The Indiana University Research & Technology Corp. (IURTC) used a series of focus groups with key stakeholders to help determine the look and feel of its new website, created to bring with it “a user-friendly, one-stop shop designed to empower and connect inventors, entrepreneurs and investors.” IURTC President Tony Armstrong, JD, MBA, says he collaborated with the university’s Creative Services Department when he determined about a year ago that the new site was needed. “We had a couple of different sites at the time — one for IURTC, and one for our incubator, the IU Emerging Technologies Center,” he recalls. “They were linked, but they had separate looks and feels, so we thought we would combine them.” At about the same time, the university went to a new single gateway, which allowed Armstrong and his team to align the look and feel of the site to the gateway as well.

Creative services staff helped Armstrong with the focus groups, which included staff, faculty members, and some outside organizations. “We held five or six of them,” he says. “They mainly involved faculty users and our staff; we wanted their thoughts on how they would use the site and what they would want us to do with it.” The focus groups yielded some revealing comments. “We learned we had to make it easier to get to the forms we have the faculty fill out for us,” says Armstrong. “We found it was more confusing than we thought in terms of where the faculty member needed to go. In the past you had to click through several levels, so we made it easier with pull-down menus.” The faculty members in the focus groups also said the disclosure forms were “a little more complicated than we thought,” Armstrong notes, so they were simplified as well.

The new site was also designed to meet a growing demand voiced by faculty and industry alike for a single clearinghouse of resources; it offers everything from primers on technology commercialization, policy statements on intellectual property, an individualized index of support staff, and a catalog and storehouse of forms covering topics from pre-disclosure to copyright and revenue sharing. A detailed article on this process appears in the August 2010 issue of Intellectual Property Marketing Advisor. For subscription information, CLICK HERE.

Posted August 31st, 2010 under Intellectual Property Marketing

Write a comment