Office of Tech Transfer, with Ashley Thomas & Art Saltarelli

In this episode, host Joshua Ross sits down with Ashley Thomas and Art Saltarelli from the University of Denver’s Office of Technology Transfer. They discuss the mission and work of this important office, which supports innovation and entrepreneurship across the university community. 

Ashley and Art provide insight into the technology transfer process – how it works, who has access to it, and the key benefits it offers for student, faculty, and staff innovators and entrepreneurs. They explain how the office helps protect intellectual property, commercialize new technologies and discoveries, and connect university innovators with industry partners and funding sources.  

Through this conversation, listeners will gain a deeper understanding of the critical role a university’s technology transfer office can play in supporting innovation and bringing products and services to market. The episode offers an inside look at the valuable services and opportunities available to the DU community. 

 Transcript:

Joshua Ross:

My name is Joshua Ross and welcome to the Entrepreneurship at DU Podcast, I had the opportunity to sit down with Ashley Thomas and Art Saltarelli: from the University of Denver’s Office of Technology Transfer. They explained how this office supports student and faculty innovation and the opportunities for the DU community to engage with and receive support from this valuable resource.

Ashley Thomas:

Every university has a mandate to put out art that is useful, whether that’s social good, or technology that can benefit the public.

Joshua Ross:

So first, some context. The Office of Technology Transfer plays a crucial role on university campuses. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the transfer of university developed technologies and intellectual property to the private sector for commercialization. In simple terms, take an innovation that has value and figure out how to make a profit. This office evaluates and protects inventions through patenting and licensing technologies. It supports university entrepreneurs, innovators and creators, and if the innovation is successful, it generates revenue by bringing it to market.

Ashley Thomas:

How can we take this research that you have gotten funding for and maybe not even gotten funding for, frankly, and put it out to make the world a better place?

Joshua Ross:

By bridging academic research and industry, the Technology Transfer Office ensures that valuable innovation created at the university reaches the marketplace. It contributes to economic development and provides value and most important creates profit for the university, the inventor and the commercial partner. Here’s the interview with Ashley in art. Well, I’m very pleased to have Ashley in Art from the Office of Technology Transfer at the University of Denver. Welcome.

Ashley Thomas:

Thanks for having us. Yeah, good

Joshua Ross:

Morning, Joshua. So let’s start with the basics. Let’s jump right into this. So what is the core purpose and mission behind the University of Denver’s tech transfer office?

Ashley Thomas:

I’ll start out with broad strokes and then let art expand a little bit. So in the big picture, we’re here as part of a by do mandate for higher education. Essentially, every university has a mandate to put out art that is useful, whether that’s social good or technology that can benefit the public because the public funding goes to the universities. So a lot of what we do is making sure that those technologies actually are transferred out to the public at a broad scale. That’s what all tech trans processes are doing. The Office of Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer focuses particularly on supporting DE’s mission, which does include public goods. So we do support the faculty as our first mission. We’re a service office, but if we can have economic impact and public good impact through our activities, that’s really an ultimate goal as well.

Art Saltarelli:

Yeah, great. And Joshua, that translates to the three main functions of the department. One is contractual support for the researchers, whatever kind of agreement they need, we provide support there. Then out of that research, once something is created, we provide intellectual property protection. We’ve filed the patent applications and trademark applications, et cetera. And then once that’s in place if applicable, that’s when the technology transfer occurs, that creation. Then we look for ways to transfer that for public good

Joshua Ross:

For our audience. You brought up a number of interesting points and we’ll dive into them, but explain what it means. Public good.

Ashley Thomas:

Yeah, that can be quite broad. And just to add some flavor to the discussion that’s been expanded lately and it’s interesting seeing how people react to this. So the National Science Foundation a couple of years ago launched a new directorate that has to do with technology transfer. Essentially that’s the core of it. They’ve been putting forward a bunch of different kinds of grants and programs to encourage universities to connect better with industry. So the funding that does come to those entities is really having public impact. Part of that is reframing public impact and technology transfer. So now technology transfer is no longer just licensing patents and things like that that are your traditional tech transfer activity, but also things like having social good come of the programs and of the funding. So we have for instance, programs that focus on doing good in rural educational systems that’s never been traditionally addressed by tech transfer.

And some of these funding programs are focused on what they call translation of basic research, and that does address those kinds of scenarios a lot better, where maybe you can get funding for those programs you wouldn’t have been able to before and you can get technology transfer officials involved in licensing that or engaging community members and figuring out how to put those programs out beyond their initial funding. Another aspect that’s pretty interesting is taking individuals who have learned how to interact with the community and using them to train maybe more STEM focused researchers that aren’t used to talking to news folks or community members and training them up on how to actually engage in this translational effort that all of us should be engaged in simply as being members of the university. So it’s much broader than people think.

Joshua Ross:

Okay, so I thought it was mainly focused on generating revenue and income from the university and that was the primary goal. But from what you’re also saying is it’s actually to do good to help people make a positive impact in our immediate community and the more broad community as well.

Ashley Thomas:

That is the assumption. I think it comes down to the history of technology transfer. Those stories that get carried are the Googles from Stanford, so it is the big success, big money generating things. We have one or two of those of our own. For instance, the missions technology that’s used on cars is a DU technology. So those big splashes happen, but that doesn’t mean that that’s all we’re interested in. I will say we have to focus on whatever our faculty are doing because we’re a service to the faculty versus students. But that said, it really is how can we take this research that you have gotten funding for and maybe not even gotten funding for, frankly, and put it out to make the world a better place.

Art Saltarelli:

But let’s not confuse things though. It’s also very valuable to put something out there to make money, et cetera. Getting a new technology out to the public to use for a fee is certainly a benefit to everyone, and it also equates to public good.

Ashley Thomas:

There’s actually a lot of ways that we can translate our technology out into public good. One way that is very common is licensing. Recently I’ve been hearing some stories though that this could be dangerous because sometimes those large entities that you want to license to are obtaining that license to crush the technology, so there’s no competition with their own technology. So it can be disturbing to see how your mandate to have public good can be destroyed if you don’t license to the right entity.

Joshua Ross:

Well, when I think of triple bottom line, it kind of feels like that in terms of you’re not only looking at people and planning and making this impact, but at the end of the day there’s a third one, which is your revenue or your profit. And so there is a piece to that that I could imagine is important as well.

Ashley Thomas:

Yeah, if I can pile onto that thought for a moment, that’s one thing that the state has been involved in, and Colorado was one of the very first ones that launched a program, maybe even literally the first, A program to support translation, I’ll use that word as we discussed a little bit ago, from basic research out into public good. And their program has a variety of different funding mechanisms. One that DU is involved with is providing matching funds at a certain ratio with the state’s funds for researchers that are doing basic research that can be commercialized. And that’s a really great program and it shows that being able to get economic impact is a factor. That’s one thing they look at in their applications. It’s not just, oh, you have a product and you’re going to sell it, but is it going to impact Colorado? Will you hire more people here? Will it bring manufacturing here? Will it become a better biological hub of the nation if we pursue this particular project? So certainly ART has a very good point, the economics matter, but our mandate is broader than that.

Joshua Ross:

You made an interesting comment about your focus is on faculty, and I’m sitting over here entrepreneurship at du, and we love supporting faculty, but really our focus is on students. So as you look at tech transfer in the office and what you’ve talked about, can you walk us through the stakeholders and who benefits from it and obviously the universities, the stakeholders, faculty, or is it a combination of a number of these different stakeholders?

Art Saltarelli:

I think every individual that you mentioned, faculty, students, the university except all benefit, they’re all, if you just look at reputational benefit from a discovery and a commercialization, all of those parties benefit. But if you break it down in terms of discoveries, there’s a big difference between a faculty discovery and a student discovery. The things that get developed in our laboratories, in our science rooms that are developed by faculty, by policy is actually owned by the university on the student side, not necessarily the case, and it’s not always a clear line, but not always the case. So when the university then owns a faculty creation, then the whole technology transfer and protection begins on the student side. They’re pretty much on their own to be able to do whatever they want with their creation. So although everyone’s a stakeholder, I guess the bottom line is there are different amounts of value that comes out of these creations,

Ashley Thomas:

And I’ll add, there’s a couple different ways to view stakeholders, and the most immediate ones are the ones that benefit from our office. Right, exactly. As are I was just talking about. But we do work with students and we do want to scale that up as we go forward in the future. One way we’re working on that right now, historically, has been to work with law students. They come in and they actually learn how to process invention disclosures, help us formulate agreements, learn how to redline things, that sort of concern. Recently we’ve been bringing in or considering bringing in students of different types of skill sets. We brought one in last summer that was more of a biology background that could be interesting. We’re talking to some other students now and may consider them in the future. But what I wanted to get to is there’s a wealth of knowledge and resources in other institutions in the university. So Daniels is a big one. The entrepreneurship program is fantastic. These programs can be leveraged in really interesting ways for mutual benefit

Art Saltarelli:

In one of the engineering departments where have these programs where students actually take an invention that’s university owned according to that policy and build a business plan around it as part of an exercise project. And it’s very successful. It’s a very valuable learning experience. And going back to student achievements, the students that you have in the entrepreneurship program, it’s wonderful to watch because taking their ideas and their business plans and we provide whatever support we can, but wonderful to see the things that they own and what they’re learning in the process.

Joshua Ross:

So let’s take this from the perspective of a faculty or a student that engages with the Office of Technology Transfer. And can you walk me through how that relationship works if they make a promising discovery on the University of Denver campus using University of Denver resources, and so how does that work in terms of the relationship and the support?

Ashley Thomas:

So on the student side, most often if there’s not substantial university resources used, which I know you mentioned, but I just want to buttress that for a moment. If there isn’t substantial resources used, then most often they own their IP and they’re free to do whatever they like with it. That said, sometimes investors or partners in their business or whatever the case may be, might want to see evidence that the university doesn’t have an interest, and in that case, they can apply for essentially a waiver letter that just acknowledges, yes, D has no interest. Go forth. You are blessed In the case where there is more university resources used, for example, maybe they’re getting special access to additional faculty or additional tooling that is not generally part of the classroom experience. There may be some DU ownership interest, and in that case, it’s more a matter of assessing whether that ownership interest is something we want to maintain as a university or whether it’s better in the hands of a student.

 

We have had things come through where the student has brought ideas to deal with them, develop them here with substantial resources, but we know that student will be better at ushering that out into the world than do would be particularly because if they graduate and take their expertise with them, what are we going to do with that tech? On the faculty side, it’s much more relatively much more clear cut. If there’s something they’re creating that is traditionally considered to belong to an academic that remains theirs, so their course materials are theirs, textbooks are theirs, et cetera, universities usually maintain a license to those so that there’s continuity of coursework. For instance, if that faculty member leaves, we can still teach that course, that kind of consideration. But otherwise we do ask that inventors or innovators, creators on the faculty side let us know about their creations so that we can actually assess them and determine whether or not de would want to formally protect it or how to protect it.

 

I should add here, I’m sure your listeners have heard this before, but patents are not the end all be all. So quite often there are much better ways to protect it or a combination of ways to protect creations. And if we don’t know about these inventions, in all likelihood we will lose that right to protect that IP and we will not be able to exclude others from using it slash license it to others or spin it out for public good. Often faculty members will put things out in the world for public use just out of the goodness of their heart, which is awesome, but we have an obligation as particularly if there’s funding involved from the federal government to report that still and make sure everyone knows about it. So the more we know about the awesome things happening in labs and classrooms and writing desks, the better.

Joshua Ross:

That was an excellent explanation. I truly appreciate it and I know our listeners will truly appreciate that as well. So thank you. So I’m going to shift a little bit here and I want to hear from both of you on what you believe you need from support to maximize your impact here at the university. Is buy-in from top leadership crucial, which it generally is, right? Is it fostering this innovative community so you get all these really cool ideas and innovations and hopefully some real products or services? Or is it building acknowledgement and opportunity and awareness among faculty and students? Or is it a combination?

Art Saltarelli:

Well, it is a combination, and as you said, we certainly need support from the top leadership in the organization. But one of the things that really spurs creativity, which is necessary for us is the grant money. We need grants drive creativity. It’s a dollar and cents kind of thing. The federal agencies, the state agencies, the other kinds of foundations that offer grants, they want something in return. They want a creation in return. They want to transfer that into commercialization. So I think if I would play something because these things all cost money, I would say grant money is pretty close to the top of what we need for spurring this whole tech transfer activity.

Ashley Thomas:

Yeah, I would add that it’s important both on the individual level because people might have fantastic ideas, but if they don’t have the means to create that idea and test it out and see if it’s viable, then innovation’s gone. You can have innovative ideas, but that does not often get protection in and of itself. The other side of that is that the tech transfer office itself needs funding. As I mentioned before, there are programs from the feds that are starting to recognize that need and support the build out of infrastructure and champions of the cause, so to speak. It’s early days in that world, so we’re not too engaged there yet, I would say. But it’s definitely of interest. It’s quite important to get community buy-in almost like a grassroots effort in a way, particularly if you aren’t the Stanfords of the world. So making sure that students know that innovation is important and want to push their PIs to be innovative, and the PIs understand that innovation matters to the university and want to report to us their innovations. The better relationships there are among the various parties, the more momentum there is behind getting these things out to the world.

Joshua Ross:

You’ve talked a little bit about the way the tech transfer process unfolds in bits and pieces throughout our conversation. From a very high level, can you walk us through it from idea to potentially commercialization?

Ashley Thomas:

So I would say that our ideal version is that we get a disclosure when someone first realizes they’ve come up with an inventive idea and have kind of proven it out to some extent because it gives us enough time to vet it and put it to our outside counsel for further vetting and assess whether or not the university wants to invest in it and in what form we would like to invest in it. From there, it can go through a variety of different avenues, but at a high level, ultimately you’re looking to protect it either in the form of patent copy or trademark or trade secret, which frankly often buttresses the others, and you can take Tri-part approaches, so it doesn’t have to be just a patent or something like that. Once those are in place, and even actually before they’re in place, you’re kind of feeling out licensees.

The more contacts the inventor has of the right type and the right industries, the easier that is. So that can actually be a factor in DU determining how it will protect the ip. Ultimately, you’re looking to license it or create a spinoff startup. So those are kind of the approaches that we tend to see the most, that are the most average, we’ll put it that way. In reality, we get the disclosures far too late or we don’t get them at all. So a big part of building out those relationships and awareness is making sure that we get those disclosures.

Art Saltarelli:

We have a faculty member and his staff have developed a really cool robot, actually it’s a robot that’s actually an educational tool that’s used with autistic children to help them learn social cues that an autistic person has difficulty learning, and it’s a cute little robot and it sends out social cues and they work with the autistic child to pick up these things, and we are finding that it works pretty well in the laboratory. So at this stage then what do we do? Is this a device that other therapy institutions would all want access to in some way, and does it have some broader kind of applications into commercialization? So we then become advisors and researchers to answer those questions and see if there is a market here and offer advice on how we might expand that service.

Joshua Ross:

What I’m trying to understand here is this innovation’s created, it’s getting spun out of the university, right? What are you actually doing at that point? Are you advising to commercialize it, to license it sell the ip? Are you also maybe helping with some type of go-to-market strategy?

Art Saltarelli:

Well, first of all, we’re going to do some research and find out if there really is a market like that. Then we’re going to have conversations with the inventor, a couple of things, saying, there’s a couple of things we can do here. We could just license this to a major corporation and see if we can generate a royalty stream or two, if you have the stomach for it so to speak, we could actually spin off a business and you create your own business. We’ve got plenty of wonderful examples around the world where that has happened, a spinoff from a university. So it kind of all depends what that person wants to do because they’re the creator, they, they’re the expert on this, and how much do they want involved? We don’t have the expertise to do that, so we advise, make suggestions, and feel their temperature and decide what to do from there.

Ashley Thomas:

An interesting aspect to this particular innovation is we’ve found that the inventor here is very open to entrepreneurial ideas. He’s in the Eph program at Denver Daniels College of Business, and he’s actually been through iCorps and some of the similar programs himself. So he’s a good person to engage in discussions of various avenues. Many inventors want to go in a certain way, either they just want to license because they live at their lab and they don’t want to have a business. Others of them believe they can do a startup and they can be a CEO and be a faculty member, and they may or may not have a great grasp of what that reality could look like. This individual is very open to alternatives and they’re taking this IP into the classroom. There’s a student group that’s working with this robot right now to formulate a business plan for it. We’ve also talked with the faculty involved in this particular pilot project to see if they might be interested in putting together a student group to take this through icorp and perhaps eventually onto the S-T-A-T-R-S-B-I funding, which is just a series of funding mechanisms that the federal government, actually National Science Foundation has put in place to try and move technology towards commercialization in a more structured fashion. Since most academics don’t know how to do this.

Joshua Ross:

So here is a wonderful illustration of different parts of the university working together. They have the Office of Tech Transfer, two people I have sitting with me today. We have the Daniels College of Business, the MBA program, faculty and the students, and then we also have the inventor who’s faculty over in the Richie School of Engineering all working together with a hope to kind of bring this idea to market.

Ashley Thomas:

Yes, it’s fantastic.

Joshua Ross:

It just puts a smile on my face. I mean, this is what entrepreneurship and innovation and working together is all about. So I love to hear that

Art Saltarelli:

It takes a lot of different skill sets as you’re just pointing out. The person has the skill to invent something in a laboratory, not necessarily have CEO skills. Those are totally, totally different. That’s why the university community, the village, so to speak, is essential for sprouting these inventions.

Joshua Ross:

I’ve always said with my view on entrepreneurship and innovation, everybody should play in the same sandbox, break down the silos, everybody in the same sandbox. Sometimes somebody may get kicked out of the sandbox or they may leave the sandbox, but let’s see, with everybody working together, what we can do. So I look forward to having you all back at some point in time to hear how some of these pilot programs are going. So as we close, I have a couple more questions. So the universities that you look at as leaders in tech transfer, kind of the effective gold standard, what are they doing really well that you perhaps want to model after?

Ashley Thomas:

I’ve seen a number of things that would be very interesting to bring in to the University of Denver if we have the opportunity someday. Some of the more baseline things that you’ve probably heard of and others have probably heard of are things like the Entrepreneur in Residence program. It’s sort of like dcbs, CEO and residence. So you can have, whether it’s fractional or volunteers or whatever the case may be, advisors for the students or the inventors, they can either advise in helping roll out the tech through a startup or license or something like that, or they could actually serve as fractional CEOs for a while to help with that. There’s also incubators, grand challenges that will usually wrap in more than just that university’s tech, but certain grand challenge programs, a lot of things along those lines. There’s also, I would say a more openness to the kinds of programs that we’re piloting. In some cases, I don’t know that those are necessarily happening at the gold standard universities, but some universities are having a lot of good luck with letting their law students start working with the business students under the guidance of faculty to work on some of these spinouts.

Art Saltarelli:

Another thing that we see often because we interact with the other technology transfer groups in the metro area and through an organization we belong to, whether it’s a university or a foundation or just a nonprofit research organization, and what a lot of them have are large staffs that are just making contacts in industry with respect to a particular area. For example, there’s individuals that are making contacts with X, Y, Z corporation and have a huge Rolodex, as we used to say, have contacts, and that’s how you get a feel for whether a creation is marketable and has commercial aspects and if there’s an interest level. So a staff with respect to that function is pretty valuable.

Joshua Ross:

In closing, how can founders and innovators in the DU community, how can they connect with you and with your office?

Ashley Thomas:

The most basic way is through our website, which is du.edu/tech transfer. We also have a portal for requests for those people who do want to submit invention disclosures or students that want to have their IP waived to them or that kind of thing. We also do a lot of other activities in support of faculty, as mentioned earlier, so there’s all kinds of other requests in there as well. Our emails are our first do last name@do.edu, so mine would be Ashley Thomas, all spelled as it sounds at do do edu arts is Arthur terelli@do.edu. We’re also on LinkedIn. I think we still have an X account as well. I would say emails probably the best way for direct outreach if you just have kind of a general question.

Joshua Ross

Well, Ashley and Art, appreciate your time today. Thank you for making me a little bit smarter. The entrepreneurship at DU podcast was recorded in Margery Reed Hall on the University of Denver campus. You can find us on Instagram at du Entrepreneur on Twitter, X at DU entrepreneur, and on Facebook at entrepreneurship at du. This episode was engineered, edited, and produced by Sophia Holt. Entrepreneurship at DU is part of the Daniels College of Business, which has its own podcast. Check out Voices of Experience wherever you get your podcast.