The “tech transfer health index” is a simple but powerful technique to quantify the impact and productivity of the entire long tail curve of technologies in a university’s IP portfolio. Here’s why we should adopt it. When I worked in a university technology transfer office, we spent a lot of time pulling together performance metrics. We had 14 different reports, each with its own subtle nuances and unique methodologies. Needless to say, despite our best efforts, our metrics didn’t reconcile well over time and unintentionally gave the impression that our tech transfer office was somewhat, uh, creative in our accounting. The problem, however, wasn’t just accuracy.
Our metrics missed the mark because they didn’t reflect the whole story: we counted mostly technology activity in the head of the long tail curve of distribution – the high-earning technologies, new startups, and issued patents. However, most staff time was spent managing “tail” technologies – filing provisional patents, marketing technologies, keeping on top of licensees who weren’t paying their bills, putting on events, and processing all types of agreement-related paperwork. Another limitation of our approach was that we counted all commercial licenses the same way, regardless of their associated impact or revenue (of course revenue is not a perfect proxy for impact, but pumping up commercial license counts by counting any invention worth a few dollars or more created a meaningless and distorted depiction of our performance). Finally, we tallied metrics in our own, idiosyncratic way that was hard to explain to outsiders, so even our AUTM metrics could not be easily compared to those from a different tech transfer office.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Measuring performance with the tech transfer health index « Triple Helix Innovation
