A NEW RESEARCH STRATEGIC PLAN FOR SUNY UPSTATE MEDICAL UNIVERSITY
ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INDUSTRY RELATIONS (E&IR) WORKING GROUP REPORT Kathi Durdon, Chair; Christopher Neville, Eric Smith, Juntao Luo, Kelsey Moody, Matthew Mroz, Richard Uhlig, Steven Hanes, William Kerr, Eain Murphy, Doug Buerkle
INTRODUCTION: The Upstate Research Strategic Plan seeks to implement changes to increase Upstate’s intellectual property (IP) portfolio and engagement with companies that drive early innovation to the market. This represents a promising option for funding research outside the traditional federal funding model. The revenue potential both to support faculty research and support growth of research operations and the research portfolio is promising. The E&IR Working Group was tasked with the charge to develop solutions and strategy to achieve proposed goals. The E&IR Working Group’s first step was to understand current industry engagement. We surveyed faculty and students to: 1) gain an understanding of our current industry relations, 2) understand how best to deepen those relationships and 3) how to form new impactful relationships. Faculty and students who indicated they were working with industry identified engagement in the following ways; speaking engagements, grant partnerships, material transfer agreements, bringing innovation to market, and through consulting arrangements. The identified reasons for not working with industry included: not knowing who the industry contacts were or how to make connections, lack of interest, lack of time, and an environment that was “too punitive.” Also remarked was that Upstate’s restrictive policies were developed due to a culture where industry was considered “unethical.” There were only a few industry partner survey respondents and they were primarily involved with universities through business development and education. To develop lasting relationships, industry respondents said that universities needed “clean partnership and contract agreements” and a nimble Tech Transfer Office. To that end, industry partners would like to see flexible and reasonable licensing agreements, clear non-disclosure and intellectual property agreements, and upper management support. They also commented that overhead was too high and key inventors were not willing to fully commit to startup generation or relinquish control. One of our working group members had conducted their own industry-level survey previously that presented the following persistent partnership gaps when working with universities: • Limited/no availability of proof-of-concept funding • Lack of business expertise and/or access to entrepreneurs • Poor understanding of holistic customer needs • Misalignment between universities and industry (objectives, risk tolerance, etc.) • High risk/Low technology readiness level of university technology 84
