Internship Best Practices for TTOs

Internship Best Practices for TTOs: How Student Team Members Can Boost Overall Productivity, Reduce Costs and Speed IP Assessment and Triage
Originally presented January, 2009

For most tech transfer offices, there’s just not enough time in the day — or enough hands on deck. And in the current economic climate, chances are the workload for you and your staff will not be getting any lighter. That could mean rising backlogs of invention disclosures, slower response times, missed revenue opportunities, disgruntled faculty — and a big increase in stress.

But there is a proven way to bring on aggressive and talented help without busting your budget, and process more invention files than ever — even in the midst of cutbacks.

How? By creating and expanding your tech transfer intern program, adding highly motivated students to your team, getting more done without staff or benefits costs, and providing a rich learning experience for students at the same time.

Unleash the power of a finely tuned intern program

To show you how to increase the value of your internship program and use it to make dramatic productivity gains, we’ve recruited two tech transfer veterans whose programs are widely recognized at best-of-breed: Lesley Millar from the University of Illinois as Urbana-Champaign and Brendan Rauw with Columbia University’s Science and Technology Ventures. Each has created a unique, simple, and proven approach to recruiting and maintaining intern staffs that have become central to productivity gains and the overall improvement of tech transfer assessment and triage efforts.

Find out how a vibrant intern program literally rescued the UI tech transfer program, and how these innovative efforts are helping UI and Columbia process 250-300 disclosures a year. We’ll reveal the secrets of their success, step-by-step. In this 90-minute session you’ll learn:

How to dramatically increase your TTOs productivity by using interns to handle REAL work
Strategies for (re)building your infrastructure: How many interns do you need, and how do you prove you need them?
Identifying and eliminating disclosure bottlenecks
Getting faculty and administrators to buy into the idea of an intern workforce
Recruiting tips for getting the best of the best — and criteria for “hiring” that keep the duds away
Creative intern training techniques
Building a work environment that gets the most out of your intern workforce
Scaling the program to your office’s needs while minimizing management oversight
Expanding the interns’ roles, including:
- disclosure assessment at intake
- drafting non-confidential disclosures
- e-mail and phone-based marketing
- conducting market research
- patent searching and analysis

You’ll also get these 4 valuable bonus resources:

A handy disclosure intake screening tool
Checklist for starting and maintaining this program in your TTO
Informative guide to export control issues
Examples of non-confidential disclosures

Meet your Speakers:

Lesley Millar has served as the Director of the Office of Technology Management (OTM) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2006, after serving as Interim Director for most of 2005. She originally joined the office in 2002 as an Engineering Technology Manager — after interning for the program herself! As Director, Ms. Millar leads a team of more than 20 professionals responsible for the identification, protection, marketing and licensing of intellectual property arising from the more than $500 million in research conducted on campus. She also works with a wide range of campus, corporate, and community partners, furthering the office’s mission to encourage innovation, enhance research and facilitate economic development. Prior to joining the OTM, Ms. Millar had an extensive career in government in England where she worked in consulting, contract and small business management, strategic planning, and policy development.

Brendan Rauw is Portfolio Director of Columbia University’s Science and Technology Ventures (STV). Mr. Rauw oversees the management and commercial advancement of the intellectual property assets emerging from Columbia’s scientific research, including the decision-making process determining which assets get and maintain patent protection, the research and analysis supporting those decisions, and managing outbound marketing of assets not otherwise covered by the licensing staff. Prior to joining STV in 2007, he was a Project Leader in the New York office of the Boston Consulting Group, where he advised major private equity and biopharmaceutical companies on acquisitions, portfolio evaluation, R&D organizational design, and therapeutic area strategies. Previously, he assessed corporate development opportunities at Genzyme Corporation, supported business development and financing at Celator Pharmaceuticals, and provided scientific consulting to major pharmaceutical clients at Cambridge Environmental. Mr. Rauw holds an AB and MBA from Harvard University.

Who Should Listen
Technology transfer managers and professionals, patent attorneys, university counsel, administrators and deans, research commercialization directors, licensing specialists, university research VPs, university CFOs, corporate licensing managers, IP consultants, and others with an interest in TTO productivity.