A detailed article on how and why TTOs can benefit from a more intensive focus on the scale-up of university-born ventures appears in the March issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the complete article, or for further subscription details, click here.

Scaling up is sometimes the forgotten stepchild when it comes to university start-up efforts, yet the scale-up phase is often the most important in terms of long-term success and impact: creating jobs, building revenue, and driving economic growth. Some TTOs have realized that getting a start-up formed is not enough, and that a focused effort on scale-up can greatly increase the odds of long-term success.

The timing and types of scale-up aid can vary from one program to another.

The University of Georgia in Athens typically starts working with start-ups on a form of scale-up when they are successful in obtaining Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding, says Ian Biggs, director of start-ups for Innovation Gateway, UGA’s tech transfer organization. In order to get an SBIR, the start-up has to be able to manage the SBIR award and commit to delivering a certain amount of activity within a certain time, so that means it needs to evolve, he says. UGA refers to this as the development phase.

“That’s where a lot of university [start-ups] have a bit of a hiccup because until that point, essentially, they can exist with just the inventor working on it,” he says. “The defining factor of this development phase is you have to have a team. One of the biggest drivers of getting projects through that difficult part of Phase One SBIR and moving into Phase Two is that we help them find the right team to work on their project. And that is not easy. Because in all honesty, it’s not a particularly attractive proposition.”

The Phase One SBIR funds will not last long, but the funding goes further with the help of a consultant who has worked with start-ups before, Biggs says, and UGA often engages a consultant for that early-stage management. Biggs says they are not needed on anything near a full-time basis, but their assistance is invaluable.

“We help people find consultants that they could bring in to be essentially almost an interim chief operating officer but only use them for one day a week,” he says. “Trust me, that’s not particularly easy, because the inventor still is the main decision maker.”

This interim step is often needed to get the start-up into the serious scale-up phase, which UGA views as occurring after a start-up has obtained some venture capital money. The VCs will typically have a good idea of who they would want to put in as management from their side, Biggs says. But to look after progress until that point, you need somebody in place who is credible to a VC, he says. It’s in between those phases where trouble often lurks.

“The really tricky part is before you take VC money, but after you reach the point where you need a team of people to work on the project. And that’s where if you leave it up to people who’ve not been through this before, progress tends to slow down significantly,” he says. “SBIR Phase Ones are not that forgiving if you don’t hit the deadlines that you put in your proposal.”

One of the key messages that UGA tries to drive home at this stage is that most expenditures are actually driven by time. Every day you spend broadly similar amounts of money, Biggs tells them. If you work on your project for two hours of that day, or you work on it for 20 hours of that day, the expenses don’t really change much, he says. The rent of the lab doesn’t change, and the people cost doesn’t change, because you pay them per day. The lesson is all about urgency, he says.

“Very recently we’ve brought on a full-time pipeline manager whose job is to keep in contact with all of the projects in the pipeline. It’s very easy for people to just stop responding or stop doing the work,” Biggs says. “Unless you’re looking — we’ve got 135 projects in the pipeline — it’s easy to miss somebody who’s just slowly stopping. We try to keep in contact with them, make sure that we know what they need, and show them how to take advantage of resources that are available.”

In many cases a start-up has encountered some roadblock that they think is insurmountable, but the program can put them in touch with someone who overcame the same problem and can guide them over the bump in the road, he says.

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The pressure is on for universities to get more innovations developed into start-ups that will ultimately create jobs, revenue and benefit the local economy. But far too many university start-ups never reach their potential – often because they don’t have the foundational structure, leadership, and early funding needed to achieve sustainable growth.

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• Preventing Legal Disputes with Faculty Start-Ups: Drafting Agreements that Avoid Future Conflicts
• Matchmaking for University Start-Up Leadership: Laying the Groundwork for Harmonious CEO/Faculty Founder Relationships
• Crafting Attractive, Sustainable Compensation Packages for University Start-Up Leadership

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The innovation system that transitions breakthroughs in research from the lab to the marketplace is constrained by the lack of available early-stage capital and development support. To address this challenge, research institutions and partners have created technology and start-up gap funding and accelerator support programs as capital and innovation support mechanisms. Their models and structures vary, as do their levels of success, and the newly updated Mind the Gap 2022 report is your essential guide to ensuring your programs are effective in moving technologies forward with long-term impact on your innovation ecosystem.

The Mind the Gap 2022 report is a detailed development guide for current and aspiring university gap fund managers that reviews and analyzes 176 active translational research, proof of concept, start-up, and venture gap fund and accelerator programs operating at 97 universities, hospitals, labs, and affiliated organizations.

Featuring more than 50 charts, figures, and diagrams that are individually downloadable for presentations and reports, this cost- and time-saving resource will provide you with gap fund program strategies to help relieve the bottlenecks in your innovation system. Whether it’s ideas for benchmarking, program development, or stakeholder communication, this report will support your effort. For complete details and a summary report, click here.

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A detailed article on Tech Launch Arizona’s video series used to celebrate the office’s 10th anniversary while serving as a key, multi-part marketing effort appears in the March issue of Technology Transfer Tactics. To subscribe and access the complete article, or for further subscription details, click here.

To celebrate its 10th anniversary last year, Tech Launch Arizona (TLA) at the University of Arizona in Tucson employed a multi-pronged marketing approach that spotlighted its success, celebrated those who helped along the way, and provided a long-lasting boost to the program’s visibility and brand. The well-honed strategy may be worth studying as a means of marking milestones for your own TTO, and leveraging the celebration as a great way to gain valuable exposure both on-campus and more widely.

In May, the TTO launched its anniversary celebrations with the release of a commissioned economic impact assessment that reviewed its successes in the previous five fiscal years and projected its impact on the local and regional economies over the next 10 fiscal years. TLA bookended that event with the October release — in conjunction with its ninth annual I-Squared Awards and Expo event — of an advertiser-supported special supplement in the local business magazine BizTucson that captured success stories from its 10-year history.

While those events provided the storytelling firepower for the 10th anniversary celebrations, TLA also chose to add multiple human connection points with a series of 17 videos highlighting the attitudes and insights of leadership, internal partners, and external partners. The final product can be viewed on TLA’s website where the Biz Tucson article is also featured. Paul Tumarkin, assistant director of marketing and communications, walked Technology Transfer Tactics through the campaign’s development process, as well as how TLA used this video series — and plans to continue maximizing its marketing impact.

The working title for this video project was “Projections and Reflections,” says Tumarkin. “The original vision was to capture the reflections on our history and the projections for our future from people who have been involved with TLA throughout our 10-year history. While in the end that name didn’t carry through to the whole project itself, it helped us position what we were doing in terms of the content we were gathering. When doing a video project, it’s easy to get off-track, so you have to keep your end game in mind” — that is, keep your focus on exactly what content you want and how you will use it.

The goal was to include interviews with people from across the full 10 years of TLA’s history, featuring key players from the entire breadth of the innovation ecosystem, says Tumarkin. “Initially, the interview pool started with a brain dump. We made a list of all these key people who have been important in our history, who would be essential in telling our story, and who would be important voices to hear in support of our mission.”

The next step was to look at how the people on the initial list grouped together, says Tumarkin. “We wanted representation from within the university, including the people who were involved in the initial effort of bringing TLA to life and the people who are now driving our growth, university leadership, and our faculty inventors and start-up entrepreneurs. Bringing in voices from the entrepreneurial and investment communities outside of the university was also key to telling the story. Achieving a balanced number of individuals in each category required some whittling, but in the end we settled on a great mix of 17 people from across our ecosystem that allows the videos to have multiple uses and speak to all our audiences.”

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