Transferring Technology – Arizona State University team to move ideas from lab to commercial world

Peter Slate sees his job as bridging the gap between universities and the commercial world.

By:
Jane Larson
Arizona Republic in NASVF.org

Slate is chief executive officer of Arizona Technology Enterprises at Arizona State University, a new venture charged with taking promising technologies out of professors’ laboratories and helping companies turn them into new products and services.

"We want to create as many viable companies as we can and bring as much into the university as we can," Slate said of the venture’s goals.

ASU announced in March that it would spin off its Office of Technology Collaboration and Licensing to form Technology Enterprise, a limited-liability company operating under the ASU Foundation.

It hired Slate from Baxter International Inc., where he had been director of global technology outlicensing for the Illinois-based biomedical company.

ASU President Michael Crow has made technology transfer a key part of his plans to help the university drive economic development in Arizona. And Gov. Janet Napolitano last month signed a bill to put on the 2004 ballot a measure to give the state’s universities more flexibility in structuring deals with companies that would commercialize university technology.

Slate says his approach will be to build relationships with companies around ASU’s portfolio strengths.

The university needs more long-term partnerships with industry, he said, which can lead to companies sponsoring university research and ultimately licensing the new technologies.

Long-term doesn’t mean slow, though. Slate wants the new unit to be quick to market, to initiate more deals and to focus on return on investment rather than the sheer numbers of spinouts or licensing deals.

The group already is working on four start-ups, a major corporate donation and a research sponsorship, Slate said.

Slate has spent the past three months building a team for the new office.

One of the group’s first tasks has been building a database of ASU’s intellectual property, including information on its patents, grants and professors’ areas of expertise.

The database represents a broad, diverse portfolio of nearly 500 patents, patent applications and invention disclosures, Slate said, and will help the group match the university’s core competencies with the needs of the market.

Having experienced licensing experts representing the university will become even more important as ASU builds its research capabilities and generates more patents, said Charlie Arntzen, director of the Arizona Biodesign Institute.

The staff members’ corporate experience should enable them to know their customers and give the business community confidence in doing business with them, said Bill Hardin, co-chairman of the technology transfer committee of the Governor’s Council on Innovation and Technology.

One long-term challenge will be developing a university culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, but Slate thinks that can happen with incentives and some eye-opening successes.

"At the end of the day, the faculty make or break" the process, Slate said. "It is all about them being innovative."