Google, tech transfer, and the weather...
As I attend many a biotech event, I find that wherever one or more business development executives are gathered, a favorite topic of conversation is to bash the local universities' technology transfer programs. It's easy to do and everyone clucks at the dearth of good technologies getting commercialized out of the universities and medical research centers. Unfortunately, whining about tech transfer is like complaining about the weather...despite our best efforts, factors that determine whether a technology is successfully commercialized is out of our control. At best, a high throughput rate or more observations could increase your chances of a "hit" or give you some patterns that could be indicative of a cold front or hot technology.
At a recent function at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, invited panelist Brook Byers, of the storied West Coast VC firms (what other type is there?) Kleiner Perkins Caufied & Byers (www.kpcb.com), commented that the Stanford Tech Transfer Office every year asks their staff to pick the one technology they license out that year which will hit it big in the future, write it on a piece of paper and put it in a sealed envelope to be opened after five years. So far, most of their predictions have missed the mark - most famously, none of the staff picked Google to be the big technology behemoth it is now when it was first licensed out to those two Stanford drop-outs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
As I attend many a biotech event, I find that wherever one or more business development executives are gathered, a favorite topic of conversation is to bash the local universities' technology transfer programs. It's easy to do and everyone clucks at the dearth of good technologies getting commercialized out of the universities and medical research centers. Unfortunately, whining about tech transfer is like complaining about the weather...despite our best efforts, factors that determine whether a technology is successfully commercialized is out of our control. At best, a high throughput rate or more observations could increase your chances of a "hit" or give you some patterns that could be indicative of a cold front or hot technology.
At a recent function at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, invited panelist Brook Byers, of the storied West Coast VC firms (what other type is there?) Kleiner Perkins Caufied & Byers (www.kpcb.com), commented that the Stanford Tech Transfer Office every year asks their staff to pick the one technology they license out that year which will hit it big in the future, write it on a piece of paper and put it in a sealed envelope to be opened after five years. So far, most of their predictions have missed the mark - most famously, none of the staff picked Google to be the big technology behemoth it is now when it was first licensed out to those two Stanford drop-outs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
