The following is a list of the articles that appear in the July 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

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Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 7, July 2018

• What makes a great university research partner? Here’s what corporate execs want. How does a corporation define a “great” university partner? While on the one hand there can be as many definitions as there are companies, discussions with several corporate alliance managers indicate there is general agreement about what sits at the top of their lists — a university that shares common goals with its corporate partner, and one that is willing to offer them appropriate IP protection.
• Use a comprehensive reporting process to solidify industry relationships. A standardized method for universities to report on their relationships with corporate partners may be the Holy Grail of corporate relations, but so far it has remained elusive. In lieu of such a find, universities are streamlining processes for gathering and reporting the details of their partnerships, with attention to the culture and structure of their own institution and customized to the specific needs of each corporate partner.
• Use this top 10 list to host a successful corporate open house. Earlier this year, the University of Texas at Dallas hosted their second annual corporate open house. With representatives from over 100 companies attending, 2018’s open house was a successful continuation and expansion of their inaugural 2017 event.
• The good, bad, and the ugly of research consortia. Here’s a multiple-choice question: Which is true? A) Consortia are great for universities, but for corporations, not so much. B) Yes, consortia can be good for universities, but they shouldn’t command a significant percentage of the time you spend on sponsored research. C) Consortia can be great for universities and corporations. The correct answer? All of the above — it just depends on the model you use, and what you put into your program.
• Oakland U’s Mobilization Zone platform is front door for regional engagement. Not all universities have the research power of an MIT, a Carnegie Mellon, or a Stanford – and some are worlds away from that sort of reputation — but that doesn’t mean they can’t make the most of their faculty and student research in both commercialization and corporate partnerships.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the June 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

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Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 6, June 2018

• U Kentucky’s Expedited IP Track offers ‘partner-friendly’ approach. In an effort to streamline sponsored research agreements, the University of Kentucky Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) and the UK Office of Sponsored Projects Administration (OSPA) are jointly piloting an “Expedited IP Track” program for corporate research partners.
• Fred Hutch at center of three-way partnership to accelerate early stage innovations. When Dr. Gary Gilliland arrived at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center as its new president and director in January 2015, he announced that the center would cure cancer by 2025.
• ‘Summit’ brings industry, universities, and VCs together for creative collaboration. “In a bi-level meeting, where venture capitalists are talking to pharma or academia, everyone knows who’s shaking who down for money,” says Alex Szidon, PhD, associate vice president for business development and licensing at pharma giant Merck & Co. in its San Francisco office. “[But] if you have VC, pharma, and academia all talking technologies, you unlace who the funder is and shift the discussion more towards the problem.”
• Kansas State’s strategies bring 80% increase in industry-funded research. Under its stated vision to become a Top-50 public research university by 2025, K-State has implemented an array of initiatives to achieve this objective, and a big part of that has been focused on building strategic partnerships with industry.
• Crick Institute’s ‘Discovery without Boundaries’ mission leads to open collaboration. On a bright, sunny day in July 2014, 100 researchers and staff from the Francis Crick Institute and GlaxoSmithKline took a tour of the London Zoo.
• Effective Non-Disclosure Agreements support better communication with partners. As universities and industry navigate the delicate dance of research collaboration, one important component of working together is establishing effective non-disclosure agreements to allow for the sharing of knowledge between the two sides of a partnership.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the May 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

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Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 5, May 2018

• Offsite company liaisons keep industry-sponsored research ties strong. Posting an industry-academia collaboration executive offsite — closer to potential research partners than to campus — can pay off if the job is carefully designed and the person who holds it is right for it; the benefits in terms of staying connected to current and potential research sponsors can be enormous. But those benefits can be hard to actually quantify, and maintaining those positions poses a communications challenge as well as an expense that’s all too easy to calculate. For many schools, those factors outweigh the upside.
• Typical metrics for corporate engagement only tell part of the story. Industry-sponsored research metrics ain’t what they used to be. Simply counting private company contract dollars coming in minus research-related expense dollars going out doesn’t come close to effectively measuring the impact of today’s more holistic approaches to industry-academia collaboration, and experts say new methods are needed to determine whether the more comprehensive ways of interacting are actually meeting everyone’s needs. Universities are now answering that call, coming up with new ways to measure what matters most to them, based on all the aspects of their relationships with corporate partners.
• Patent infringement risks may be few, but don’t ignore them in industry partnerships. How much risk of patent infringement is associated with industry-sponsored research? For garden variety deals — company supports work in principal investigator’s lab, school licenses discoveries to company — not much, say attorneys and other experts. But some of the subtler set-ups between schools and private industry might make patent infringement a bigger problem, they caution, because they involve closer contact between researchers and corporations.
• Expanding research relationships requires commitment on both sides. Pennsylvania State University has scored a big win with a dramatic expansion of an existing relationship into a platform innovation partnership that includes a five year commitment in the form of a Master Research Agreement. Imerys, a mineral-based industrial solutions company, signed the five-year Master SRA that expands its relationship with the school’s Materials Research Institute to include “the development of new technologies, materials and other intellectual property.”

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the April 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

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Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 4, April 2018

• Fabric institute’s one-stop licensing initiative bundles background university IP. The One-Stop Licensing Initiative now being tested at the Cambridge, MA-based Advanced Functional Fabrics of America Institute includes access to aggregated background intellectual property from its university members — including its host, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
• Business plan competition transformed into path to industry partnerships. A basic business plan competition at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine has been re-engineered into a months-long sponsored program for academic researchers and corporations that’s “more collaborative and engaging.”
• Research potential partners and broaden your pitch to include holistic engagement. To make the most of the multiplying opportunities for face-to-face meetings with potential research collaborators, do your homework in advance.
• Pfizer’s ITEN fosters early research ties with university partners. Pfizer Inc. has added a collaborative drug discovery model to its academic partnerships menu, aimed at the very earliest stages of research and focused more on relationship-building than on commercializing specific new compounds.
• Incyte collaboration with Vanderbilt is all about the connection, not just funding. Research collaborations between universities and corporations are not always perfectly constructed or designed from the start. And just as a start-up company often needs to evolve, pivot, and iterate, so too do industry-academic partnerships in many cases.
• Telecom Italia reports success with Joint Open Labs program. Telecom Italia, Italy’s largest telecommunications company, says it’s succeeding so far with a new approach to collaborative research that places the company’s researchers on partner university campuses.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the March 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

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Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2018

• UGA’s new Industry Express program removes friction from corporate partnerships. The University of Georgia has joined the ranks of schools revamping their intellectual property policies to streamline and smooth the path to more industry sponsorships.
• Tulane “immersion program” uses tourism draw to create industry relationships. The pitch is appropriately seductive: “What if you could work with us from your personal Tulane office?” The come-on continues by pointing out that in New Orleans you can “brainstorm over cafe au lait and beignets, a fantastic jazz set or dinner prepared by a James Beard Foundation Award-winning chef — or experience culinary chemistry in the form of an innovative cocktail hour hand-crafted by one of our world-renowned ‘star-tenders.’”
• TriNetX, other networks offer boost in sponsored clinical trials and pharma connections. It’s a problem many universities would love to have: After signing up with an external network that arranges sponsored clinical trials, that form of sponsored research increased so much and so rapidly that more infrastructure is needed.
• UNL seed fund fosters external partnerships with eye on sponsored research. A new seed funding program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln aims to assist faculty in forging partnerships with community entities, pairings that research leaders hope will lead to sponsored research collaborations.
• Maximize the impact of centers and institutes on partnership opportunities. The specialty centers and institutes that dot — sometimes dominate — the research enterprise landscape at many universities are seeing their profiles rise and their influence expand as their host institutions pivot to a fuller focus on industry-academia collaboration.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the February 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

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Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 2, February 2018

• Industry research contracts getting more complex, require a more flexible approach. The contracts that govern industry-sponsored research agreements are more challenging to negotiate than they used to be, and they’ll probably be more challenging still in the future — because sponsored research itself keeps getting more complex, sophisticated and diverse, contracting experts say.
• Schools and sponsors agree: Faculty need to know their role in IP protection. Intellectual property issues in industry-sponsored research are complicated to begin with, and contractual terms for protecting IP are often critical to the corporate partner. While university contract negotiators may agree to the terms and conditions, there could be a huge chink in the school’s IP protection armor — their own faculty researchers’ relative ignorance of IP issues and rules — that could bring a world of problems to those overseeing industry partnerships.
• UT-Arlington’s strategic plan integrates push for industry partnerships. When the University of Texas at Arlington research enterprise set out to refocus its efforts in line with the school’s Strategic Plan 2020: Bold Solutions Global Impact, the focus first was on people. The school has now attained warp speed in its plan implementation efforts, and President Vistasp Karbhari, PhD, tells Industry-Sponsored Research Management that “most of the changes focus on sponsored research.”
• Innovation roadmaps help universities and industry identify partnership opportunities. A growing number of universities and industry groups are spending considerable time and effort to create detailed reports on economic trends, business development, and research and innovation capabilities, providing a platform to relate sponsored research activity directly to economic development.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the January 2018 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

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Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 2, No. 1, January 2018

• Transition from corporate relations to corporate engagement requires teamwork, training. As universities restructure, reconfigure and refocus their interactions with industry partners — with an increasing emphasis on maximizing company touch points — the corporate relations function in particular finds itself in a state of considerable flux.
• U New Mexico benchmarking report maps out corporate engagement improvement strategy. A benchmarking report from the University of New Mexico called Research Strategic Plan: Final Working Group Report on Corporate Relations aimed to “examine the range of industrial interactions nationally and at selected exemplar institutions and propose new ways in which UNM can dramatically increase corporate-sponsored research.”
• USF opens ‘unique’ new Office of Corporate Partnership. The University of South Florida opted for a “unique” structure when it recently refined the way the school interacts with the private sector.
• International SRAs worth the extra effort they require. Negotiating and administering sponsored research projects with international corporate partners is more time-consuming and requires more effort than do deals with domestic collaborators — “international” anything almost always does. But international deals are worth the extra hassle, say industry research managers who’ve completed them. And the benefits go far beyond monetary.
• Indiana U, OrthoWorx partner on start-ups and sponsored research. A new collaboration between Indiana University’s recently spun out start-up shop and a regional not-for-profit’s just-launched accelerator is mainly aimed at start-ups and licensing, but it could lead to sponsored research opportunities as well, focused on new or more cost-effective therapies for musculoskeletal injuries and diseases.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the December 2017 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

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Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 1, No. 9, December 2017

• Master the details to effectively manage industry-sponsored research negotiations. Negotiating the contracts that underpin industry-sponsored research agreements isn’t getting any easier, no matter how widespread or common those agreements are becoming. And it’s not likely to, either, because each SRA is unique and requires a very nuanced legal document behind it.
• Technology showcases can serve double duty, facilitate industry-sponsored research. When you mention technology showcases for university innovations, most of your colleagues would likely think of the event as a technology transfer marketing exercise, showing potential licensees and start-up founders or investors the commercial fruits of researchers’ labor. And while that is often the case, there doesn’t need to be a bright line between licensable technologies and early-stage sponsored research opportunities at technology showcases, as several schools are proving.
• Be ready to respond when bad publicity hits. There’s a decent chance that someone sooner or later will complain about one of the industry-funded research projects your institution takes part in. It happens all the time — usually taking aim at perceived industry bias or faculty COIs — at some of the nation’s platinum research universities are the targets.
• Industrial Advisory Board offers guidance, facilitates industry research deals. The Industrial Advisory Board that helps shape the research agenda for the Trenchless Technology Center at Louisiana Tech University — helping to keep it focused on industry’s evolving needs — also provides valuable access to its member companies for Tech’s student researchers. In addition, the corporate members of the board — which also includes consultants, associations and several municipalities, including Boston, New York and Los Angeles — represent the TTC’s main source of sponsored research.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the November 2017 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

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Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 1, No. 8, November 2017

• Streamlined contracting models an investment in future sponsored research deals. Building a better industry-sponsored research contracting process — easing one of industry partners’ key pain points by streamlining contracting and licensing — shows a university’s willingness to be flexible when it comes to making industry-academia collaboration happen, and it’s a reputation enhancement more and more potential partners are looking for.
• Open innovation effort creates ‘patent-free playground’ to spur research. Declaring itself “out of the rat race” — and characterizing current technology commercialization methods as “protectionist” and essentially broken — Denmark’s Aarhus University, several other schools, and a handful of industrial companies there have agreed to collaborate on “industrially relevant research” without the pressure of patents.
• Georgia Tech’s economic development efforts spawn industry-sponsored research. The Georgia Institute of Technology’s economic development operations in downtown Atlanta — including its own self-contained innovation ecosystem at Technology Square — also are helping to boost the school’s industry-sponsored research income.
• Are your data security precautions for industry partnerships adequate? Protecting the data that moves around during industry-sponsored research projects — among university colleagues, other research institutions and, often, sponsors’ research operations — is critical, more and more so as hackers become a pervasive threat, data volumes expand, sponsored research activity increases and the global scope of collaborative inquiry grows.
• Purdue credits focus on basics for record year of industry funding. At Purdue University, success in industry-sponsored research isn’t rocket science. The school racked up record research numbers this year and attributes it to an almost back-to-basics approach to technology development: Hire faculty who do good work, set up systems to facilitate sponsorship, and do what’s needed to make collaboration happen.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the October 2017 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

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If you would like a free copy of the premiere issue, click here.

Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 1, No. 7, October 2017

• Emory reorganization merges industry-sponsored research with tech transfer office. Emory University isn’t the first school to restructure its industry-sponsored research efforts in a bid to gain synergy with existing tech transfer office activity, and it won’t be the last.
• Three pharma giants reveal what they seek in university research partners. Universities looking to score big with Big Pharma need to make sure the researcher behind their technology is part of the partnership-building process, and they need to demonstrate that they’re committed to supporting the research through commercialization.
• CU-Boulder racks up industry funding as it adds master research agreements. The recent addition of a formal Master Research Agreement to the ongoing relationship between the University of Colorado Boulder and Lockheed Martin Corp.– an event that merited its own public on-campus signing ceremony — also represents forward movement in the school’s efforts to expand its use of the process-smoothing documents.
• IBM-MIT mega-deal brings “staggering” collection of AI research resources to bear. IBM’s nearly quarter billion dollar deal — yes, billion — around artificial intelligence research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is, both parties say, best viewed as the natural next step in their deep ongoing relationship.
• ‘Corporate Engagement Bootcamp’ aims to plant seeds of industry collaboration. The latest — and largest — event in the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership’s ongoing corporate engagement bootcamp road show has just wrapped up in Albany NY, with the State University of New York’s SUNY Polytechnic Institute acting as host.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the September 2017 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar collection, Best Practices in Forming and Managing Industry-University Partnerships.

If you would like a free copy of the premiere issue, click here.

Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 1, No. 6, September 2017

• U Penn ramps up industry sponsorships as percent of funding jumps from 6% to 15%. The University of Pennsylvania keeps racking up successes in its quest to boost innovation and commercialization, and much of its effort revolves around industry sponsorship.
• Ford, UM-Dearborn assessing faculty internship results with eye on expansion. Industry-sponsored research managers at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and Ford Motor Company are reviewing a first-of-its-kind internship program they launched this summer, which placed UM faculty members inside the automaker’s operations for four months to work alongside and discuss innovations with like-minded researchers there.
• Judgment, flexibility key to managing sponsors’ payment problems. Problems with sponsors paying properly can, for the most part, be avoided by doing some basic homework upfront, and they can usually be ameliorated after the fact by staying flexible and keeping the lines of communication open.
• Baxter looks to build its pipeline through industry-sponsored research deals. Baxter International Inc. has just reported the third in its hat trick of recent sponsored research agreements, each an example of the varying level of research focus found in collaborations the medical products monster is launching as it dramatically expands its new product research and development efforts, but with a sharp eye on costs.
• Industry-sponsored research, entrepreneurial activity mix it up at U Toronto’s Impact Centre. Industry-sponsored research thrives alongside start-ups and student education at the University of Toronto’s Impact Centre, which intentionally blurs the lines that divide the main pathways to commercialization and offers instead a one-stop shop for turning ideas into products.

The following is a list of the articles that appear in the August 2017 issue of Industry-Sponsored Research Management monthly newsletter. 

If you are a current subscriber click here to log in and access your issue as well as your bonus webinar collection, Best Practices in Forming and Managing Industry-University Partnerships.

If you would like a free copy of the premiere issue, click here.

Industry-Sponsored Research Management
Vol. 1, No. 5, August 2017

• U of Waterloo streamlines industry contracts, expands liaison staff to woo more partners. An ongoing research strategy reboot at the University of Waterloo aims to fine-tune the school’s relationship-building with corporate sponsors and to broaden the scope of its industry-sponsored research efforts.
• Publicity about agreement milestones helps promote university’s research capabilities. Publicly promoting successful industry-sponsored research milestones can be a powerful vehicle for trumpeting the school’s overall research capabilities and its interest in additional industry partners. 
• University econ dev network unexpectedly finds niche in industry-sponsored research. Industry-sponsored research was not a priority for the technology transfer and economic development leaders who created Innovate New Mexico®, a recently formed network of the leading research institutions in the state focused on building entrepreneurship, start-ups and economic development benefits out of university innovations.
• Iowa State finds success with specialty services for industry. When Iowa State University launched and started publicizing its new Flexible Solutions reboot of IP and tech transfer offerings, the Office of Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer included research services that many such overhauls neglect: the ancillary “funding avenues for industry-sponsored research,” or specialty services, that often accompany and may sometimes lead to bigger-ticket projects.
• Big Pharma and universities invest together in drug discovery partnership. Apollo Therapeutics LLP — a drug discovery collaboration with three university and three pharma company partners — has funded, launched or planned more than half a dozen “novel and compelling” programs in “areas of high medical need,” and more than $11 million is on the table for the first four “milestoned project plans.” At least two more projects are in the final planning stages, and “multiple” additional programs are being evaluated.