THE NEED FOR DIALOGUE AND MORE EFFECTIVE NETWORKING

There is an important conversation happening about technology commercialization in Alberta. Doug Horner, the new Minister of Advanced Education and Technology recently established a task force on Productivity, Value Added and Commercialization to evaluate how to accelerate economic diversification via technology commercialization. While this task force is reaching out to many key stakeholders, we need wider democratic participation on these issues.

What are the key issues and what are some possible solutions? Many emphasize the problem of the lack of capital. Perhaps it would be useful to create a government sponsored venture fund. Perhaps we do need more angel investing. But this Province has a great deal of wealth with many latent angels--so perhaps the techcom community has not figured out how to cultivate enough attractive opportunities that are being developed with experienced managers and entrepreneurs?

We have a lot of great science and technological development at universities such as U of A, but much of this sits on the shelf and never gets connected to people with business experience to move it towards commercialization effectively. How can we catalyze such processes and enable knowledge flows and entrepreneurialism to occur at the interstices between university and industry, scientists and graduating MBAs, nascent organizations and patient capital.

While I believe that there many gaps in the techcom infrastructure that need to be addressed, we also have many valuable resources in the form of great scientists and technoscientific ideas, small and medium enterprises, and seasoned managers and entrepreneurs. We also have many diverse initiatives across various institutions. Much could be gained by harnessing these extant resources much more effectively through the creation of denser networks of interaction. Perry Kinkaid's efforts in creating the Alberta Council of Technologies is ememplary in this regard, but we need many more such initiatives and many more Perry Kinkaids. In addition to industry development via cluster building, we need entrepreneurial opportunity development through networking and efforts to create networks of networks, fostering the creation of brokers who act as links across different networks.

A key problem is information asymmetry and the ability to link, for instance, the scientist with her useful technological idea to the right business mind who can see how to translate that upstream idea into an application and product. Organizations like TEC Edmonton and UTI are obviously key elements in this translation of idea to product, but have limited capacity. We need to build a broader networking infrastructure to make this happen. Communication modalities such as this blog can help to seed this, but the community needs to crescively emerge. It cannot be forced or strategically managed. DIALOGUE IS THE STARTING POINT! WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?

TEC Student Entrepreneurship Program

Today was the official launch of the Ingenuity Enterprise Program which includes the TEC Student Entrepreneurship Program supported by the Technology Commercialization Centre (TCC) at the University of Alberta School of Business in collaboration with TEC Edmonton and Alberta Ingenuity. We identify technologies around campus and form teams with MBA students to conduct analyses and develop technology commercialization plans to move science and technology into the marketplace. This year was our first pilot program and we had many MBA students involved in technologies including a new software search engine based on artifical intelligence, an eco-sensitive wood preservatives, mobile telecommunications hardware, and a new method for the introduction of genes into plants via cholorplast transformation. My hope is that the students and other stakeholders involved in these projects will contribute to this blog to discuss their experiences, but also that this communication modality will be used to construct a broader dialogue about technology commercialization in the greater Edmonton and Alberta-wide community.

Technology commercialization is absolutely crucial to spur economic growth and development as well as diversification of the economy. We have great science and a great deal of government money has helped to build this resource. Much less attention has been paid to how we can build on this science to foster economic growth and development--that is how to enable commercialization of science and technology. To do this requires the creation of a broad infratsructure as well as a change in cultural understandings that make technology commercialization an appropriate focal point for our star scientists as well as for our taxpayer dollars. While I have many ideas on this topic, I will leave this post purposively short and encourage others to contribute their ideas and foster a dialogue on these issues. My hope is that this blog may be used as a central point for such a broader dialogue between university, industry, government and others as well as a place for network building and solving practical problems related to technology commercialization. Let the interaction begin!

Professor Michael Lounsbury
ml37@ualberta.ca

Patent Infringement

Since working on the ultracapacitor project I have been following the ultracapacitor market a little bit. And low and behold, today there's a news item that Maxwell Technologies, the market and patent leader, got a preliminary injunction against the Korean company NessCap, one of the companies I mentioned that doesn't have any IP:

http://www.sys-con.com/read/360713.htm

Maxwell Technologies, Inc. announced today that
a federal district court in the Southern District of California has issued an
order finding that Maxwell has established a likelihood of its success in the
patent infringement action it filed against Nesscap, Inc. and Nesscap, Ltd.
("Nesscap") in October 2006, accusing Nesscap's ultracapacitor products of
infringing two of Maxwell's U.S. patents. The court also determined that Maxwell
would be irreparably harmed if a preliminary injunction does not issue. As a
result, U.S. District Judge John A. Houston ruled that a preliminary injunction
will issue, prohibiting Nesscap from making, using, selling or offering to sell
its prismatic ultracapacitors in the United States while the litigation is
pending.

...On a related note, after Maxwell brought its infringement action against
Nesscap in San Diego in October 2006, Nesscap filed a patent infringement action
against Maxwell in federal district court in Delaware in December 2006.

So looks like NessCap does have one or more patents, I just couldn't find it. Too bad the patent # isn't referenced in the article.

I wonder if anybody came across some information regarding licensing of technologies. The Open Innovation book talks about most patents being near worthless, but then you hear about IBM's patent portfolio generating over a billion in revenues every year. So what do licensing agreements typically look like? % of revenue? Flat fee?