Harl Tolbert, assistant technology transfer director at the University of Rochester Medical Center, said successful technology transfer — or the process of ensuring technological developments reach a wide range of people — can bolster a university's reputation.
"At Rochester, we've been fortunate to have quite a few biomedical technologies, but we also have some engineering technologies that have been big," Tolbert said. "But as a university, if you can say that technology developed at the University of Rochester prevents dozens of cases of deafness each year, that's important to society. That's important to anyone you make a pitch to that the university is important and relevant."
Tolbert is one of the final four candidates for the position of vice president of the multidisciplinary office at the UT Research Foundation.
The other three candidates include Michael Dilling, technology transfer director at Baylor College of Medicine; Eugene Krentsel, assistant vice president at the State University of New York in Binghamton; and James Zanewicz, technology transfer director at the University of Louisville.
All four candidates spoke at the Haslam Business Building this week on the promise and challenge of university technology transfer, with Tolbert speaking last on Wednesday afternoon.
Tolbert said universities can leverage successes in technology transfer in many different ways.
"You can use that in your fundraising efforts," Tolbert said. "You can use that in your grant solicitations, alumni relationships. If you make an approach to the state for more funding, or if you have to justify your existence to the state, being able to say that we have success commercializing technology — and it affects people's lives — can go a very long way toward accomplishing that."
Another way, he said, that technology transfer is important to the university is that it enables better researcher-faculty recruitment.
"Researchers who we hire at the University of Rochester, new faculty members, very often, they want to talk to the tech transfer office," he said. "They want to know who are the people that will be managing my technologies, who will be reviewing my invention disclosures, what have they done? Do they know what they're doing? What can I expect if I work with your office?"
And those interactions with the office beforehand can influence their decision to pick the university to join, he said.
Tech transfer also provides for the university fairly unrestricted revenue, he said, among other things.
For researchers, while he said generation of personal income is "a plus," the real fulfillment comes from practical applications of research.
"Any time they can point to a practical application of their research and how it improves a process or how it improves society, it makes another product faster, better, cheaper, I think that's what academic researchers are really looking for when they engage in the technology transfer process," he said.
Plus it helps with gaining research funding, he said, because companies want to partner with a university and a researcher.
"But one of the key factors in that relationship is how will intellectual property be handled?" he said. "Because if a researcher is working with a company, chances are, they are working on a more practical application on a piece of research than they would if they had an NSF (National Science Foundation) grant."
For industry, it's simply more cost-effective for a company to license research from university researchers with experience working in the field, rather than hire a new team of researchers to embark on a new endeavor.
It also reduces the time of product development, grants access to research resources and offers research flexibility for companies, he said.
Tolbert's presentation was not meant to critique UT's past or present, he said.
"I have been on campus for five or six hours now," he said. "... So when I talk about what tech transfer can do or what tech transfer should do, in no way am I trying to say what the University of Tennessee should have done."
He described his current university, the University of Rochester, as providing him with a rich background with medical technologies.
"If you're not familiar with the University of Rochester, the way I describe it is we're a very large academic medical staff, with a small liberal arts college attached," he said.
He said he knew the technologies at Rochester and at UT would be different.
"But we do have a history of success at tech transfer," he said. "Normally we're in the top 10 or top 15 in terms of licensing revenue, and that's allowed us to try some things that are slightly different, to think out of box sometimes, and come up with some new strategies for tech transfer."
He affirmed his strength as a candidate by pointing out his experience at Rochester.
"Maybe even if we don't have varying strategies for tech transfer because I know it's not a one-size-fits-all approach, we do have a very sound basis in technology transfer and commercialized technology, and I think those skills are applicable in any environment," he said.
Mary Ann Warwick Russell, UT Research Foundation staff attorney, said the final four candidates are strong.
"We have some very well-qualified people," she said. "So I think we'll be able to make a good choice."