CIESA “SPP” (Seguridad Privada y Protección)

Technology transfer managers were the only stakeholder group in this study who sincerely believed that they were there to facilitate the commercialisation of publicly funded research. The prevailing view amongst them was that most academic scientists do not know how to commercialise or do not have the time for it. They could help the scientists to identify potential IP, package and protect it. An illustrative remark was:

I mean it is horrible to see a researcher basically attempt to spend ten years of their life on researching an outcome, get it wrong, and come out with an outcome that’s not commercialisable. We much prefer to make sure they do their ten years worth of work, we are there alongside them helping them, they get an end product and result that is commercialisable, and everybody wins.

The majority of technology transfer mangers interviewed thought that their office had a very well-trained team. The team had the necessary knowledge and skills in research commercialisation, which academic scientists could tap into. A representative comment was as follows:

We’ve got all the range of skills that academics need help with. As a team we’ve got intellectual property specialists, business analysts who can help identify markets and work with marketers, venture capital in-built through an internal seed fund, business development managers in different fields. So it is all there and we just need to let the academics know it is all there and to come and work with us.

Besides assisting scientists to commercialise, some technology transfer managers also believed that they could help industry by making the IP transfer process less difficult. In illustrating this point, a technology transfer manager said:

One of the big things is that industry has this perception that dealing with the university is very difficult; whereas we make it less difficult for them by understanding the rules of engagement and having all the formal contracts, and the timely turnaround of those, because most of us have come from industry and we know the frustrations of having worked with universities ourselves.

Another finding of this study was that the technology transfer managers have learnt from their experience and become more realistic about research commercialisation. Many respondents from high profile research intensive universities have gradually moved away from an approach which involved setting up spin-off companies. The rationale was explained by a technology transfer manager:

In terms of spin-offs we are not so much focused on that primarily because there are very few technologies out there that become successful spin-offs. Because it really has to be a strong technology. Yes. And there’s very limited expertise in Australia for managing those sorts of companies. We could spin-off stuff but then trying to find the right CEO and so on is quite tough, so what we tend to find is most of them tend to fail.

When I asked the technology transfer managers about their challenges to commercialise IP resulting from public sector research, almost all respondents said that many of the difficulties which were frequently mentioned in the government reports have already been overcome. For example, as described by a technology transfer manager, they have learnt to standardise the legal agreement and streamline the transfer process:

A lot of those issues have been solved. A lot more of the agreements are standardised, we don’t argue so much over warranty clauses. You know there used to be a lot of time involved in that sort of nonsense. There are lawyers and there is no incentive for them to transfer quickly. But now a lot of those issues are overcome.

Although some of the issues in research commercialisation could be resolved by the technology transfer managers, there were other challenges which were beyond their personal control. Some of the challenges were related to the nature of university technology. The respondents consistently reported that university technology was generally at too early a stage with many unresolved problems. Companies on the other hand were looking for something more advanced which they could use quickly to generate income or add value. Therefore, it was not easy for the technology transfer managers to make the companies become interested in university IP. In illustrating this point, a respondent said:

The biggest hassle is that invariably your technology is just not advanced enough for their taste. Everyone wants a phase three product. Everybody wants that. And if a pharmaceutical could get away with just in-licensing things for marketing, you could make a business out of that. But they can’t, so invariably your data is just not good enough. You know you might have one animal model, they want two! Or maybe your animal model is a rabbit they want something else. Or maybe not even have that. So you have to do a lot of work just to get them convinced that this is a good technology that they would want to own.

Some respondents also realised that the transaction costs involved in getting university technology transferred were quite high. Due to the early nature of university technology, the technology transfer managers often had to spend substantial time and effort to further develop the IP and package it to suit the industry’s need. A representative comment was:

You get an opportunity with all its problems and requiring significant investment. That’s what you are going to get from university technology. And you might get to own it because you are first on board with it, and that’s the plus side. The downside is it’s going to require a lot of your time. So unless it is perfectly aligned with what your business is doing, you can bolt that technology on to yours, like an antigen for an assay or something

that just fits in with your technology – it is always going to require a lot of technology transfer effort. So I call that transaction overhead.

Another challenge identified in this study was the difficulty of attracting investors to invest in university IP. This again was related to the early nature of university technology. Most respondents acknowledged that it was actually relatively easy to find a small amount of pre-seed funding. Surprisingly, they found the challenge was not the lack of investors or funding, but the lack of university technology that is worthwhile investing in. For example, the following comments made by three technology transfer managers all illustrate this point:

And there’s the pre-seed fund set up by the Commonwealth government to do that, and there are other private investors who will still play in that space. So we don’t find there’s any lack of money to be honest. There’s a lot of willing investors. The common thing of course is, how good is your technology, and is it really something that has a large market potential? Is it marketable internationally? How strong is your intellectual property position? What competitive advantage do you have? It is all the normal things you would evaluate in assessing a business opportunity. So the investors I’ve spoken to certainly say it is more of matter of, we have the money but we are a little short on identifying the best opportunities, and it is the quality of opportunity they are looking for.

You know I’ve been having a conversation where they’ve said, you know that there are great antibody companies in Europe and the US and there’s nothing here, and when they [venture capitalists] looked at the projects we were running here, they said oh no, it was all too early, etc. etc. So there is still this disconnect between getting the projects robust enough.

So if you talk to someone from CM Capital or someone from GBS or Starfish. I mean Starfish is a pooled development fund, so it actually has some bits of money from the government anyway. If you talk to people like that they’ll say the money is here, or if you talk to Biotech Capital, I have the money if I can find the deals.

From a technology transfer manager’s perspective, there was a disconnect between what the research institutions could offer and what the customers wanted. Some respondents did not believe that this issue could be easily resolved by having more access to funding. A technology transfer manager explained:

But the biggest problem to commercialising is that the customer wants to have quite well advanced technology and a lot of the problems addressed, and they are problems generally that the outsider isn’t interested in. So there needs to be some funding that will then address that issue of how to design, or fund some experiments that will take the technology close to what the customer is interested in. And may fund things that the scientists themselves would never do or couldn’t find money for. But the caveat would be that you would have to manage it very carefully. And I don’t know exactly how you would do that but otherwise it just becomes more funds for more experiments.