Exploring the 'Hub and Spoke' model of Technology Transfer

Tom Hockaday, Managing Director, Isis Innovation Ltd

February 2010

Most commentary on technology transfer offices is based upon the fairly straightforward perspective of a single university, located in one place, with a single technology transfer office.  This is perfectly reasonable given the number of universities to which this situation applies.  However, this simple model does not apply to national research institutes with geographically dispersed research centres.  In addition some of the points arising relate equally to regional clusters of universities considering how to optimise technology transfer resources.

This paper explores the specific additional challenges in optimising technology transfer systems for research based institutions which have activities in a number of different locations.

To explain our use of terms: by different locations we mean centres of research activity separated by significantly more than a few kilometres.  It is common for modern universities to have activities spread over their home city, sometimes with outlying centres a few kilometres outside the city, and these are not the main focus of this note.  The technology transfer office (“TTO”) is that part of the university responsible for commercialising university owned intellectual property through the core activities of: attracting and assessing invention disclosures; patenting and other forms of intellectual property protection; licensing; spin-out company formation; material sales; managing seed funds. The TTO may also incorporate a function that helps researchers sell their time as expert consultants.  An institution may be a university, a government lab, part of the healthcare system or a company research activity; anywhere engaging in research.

Objectives

The objectives of the TTO, from this perspective, are to make sure it is sufficiently well known and well regarded for researchers to make the effort to contact their TTO, rather than not bother.  Researchers are busy people; undertaking research, teaching when in universities, and when successful at these two becoming involved in administration.  However strong the policies and rules, it is fundamentally a matter of personal choice whether a researcher contacts their TTO or not.  Given this, TTOs need to work out how to behave in such a way that researchers do make the effort to get in contact.

One place

When the research activity is in one place the TTO can operate from one location and engage in sensible internal marketing activities to attract researchers to its doors.

Effective internal marketing involves engaging in a wide range of activities to raise awareness and win support.  We do not advocate intrusive technology audits; these are likely to alienate researchers as however carefully the question is phrased, asking someone if what they are doing is useful according to your criteria not theirs is likely to be demotivating.  We do advocate behaving in such a way that researchers know about the TTO (website, newsletters, seminars, attending and hosting events) and like it (this is harder but is achieved by being nice, respectful, helpful, building a relationship).

The advantages of the TTO operating from one location are:

1. A known centre of excellence for researchers.
2. A concentrated resource, managed to operate and deliver in a focussed way.
3. A concentrated pool of professional expertise and mutual support, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
4. An internal network of individuals who share information.

Some single location institutions adopt a distributed or devolved model.  In this model there will be a small central TTO capability with other TTO people distributed across key faculties or departments across the single site.  (In some cases this model may be varied to the extent there is no central capability at all, all the TTO people are distributed across departments.)

There are weaknesses to this approach:

1. Losing the advantages set out above.
2. The additional management time in maintaining the technology transfer team.
3. The risk that the devolved resource will be distracted and diverted into other activities.  The pressures of helping researchers win research funding now are likely to prevail over those of possibly transferring some technology later.  The result is that the TTO people find themselves doing not very much TT.

An ideal situation can be where there are people in the departments who actively promote the TTO whilst not actually being part of it.  They encourage colleagues to engage in TT and interact with the TTO, and talk up its merits.  This is most naturally achieved through a successful programme of internal marketing (described above).  These individuals act as voluntary, honorary members of the TTO, but of course recognised by researchers as research colleagues.

Many places

When a research institution has research activity located in different sites it can become counter-productive to have all the technology transfer capability in one location.

The UK example of The British Technology Group certainly shows the challenges of running a national technology transfer programme from the capital city; an experiment conducted with only limited success from the 1950s to the 1990s.

When is it right to recognise that the single location TTO is not the best model?  The tipping point may be a straightforward function of travel times, but there are other factors at play which make things more complicated. 

The ‘us and them’ culture felt between those in the central, head office and those in the outposts can be a significant barrier to effective operations; even if the inefficiencies of travel times are set to one side, the visit from the person from Head Office is very different from one of your own side dropping in.

Physical geography is important.  It is simply inefficient to have people spending large amounts of time travelling even when tooled up with the latest communications technologies.

This has led us to the conclusion that in a multi-location institution it is sensible to adopt a ‘hub and spoke’ or ‘starfish’ model.

Spokes - There needs to be someone located at each site who all those at that site recognise as (i) one of their own and (ii) good at TT.  It may be there is more than one person at some sites.

The Hub - In addition, there needs to be one location where there is a central concentration of technology transfer expertise.

Technology transfer has for a long time been described as a ‘contact sport’.  The TTO people and the researchers need to know each other; it is helpful if the patent attorneys can meet the inventors; building a spin-out team requires spending large amounts of time in the same room.

The central hub provides central resources:

• A single contact point for the Institution on technology transfer matters.
• Central information collection and management.
• Administration and marketing support.
• Professional technology transfer expertise (see below).

The individual outposts (at the end of the spokes) provide:

• A personal point of contact for researchers.
• A ‘home side’ person, part of the local team, who can help researchers.
• A ‘front door’ on the site for anyone interested in TT to knock on.
• Sufficient expertise to attract disclosures and take projects forward to the next stage.
• People who know who to involve and how to involve them; a sign-posting capability.

Partnering to gain experience

A large multi-site institution may have the resources and the requirement for a centralised TT function which has sufficient scale to operate at the highest levels.  When the institution lacks the resources to develop its own technology transfer capability it can acquire these from entering into a partnership agreement of some sort with a third party.

This brings the following benefits:

• Access to broad expertise and experience.
• Access to established business and professional networks.
• The opportunity to learn from someone else’s mistakes ensures you do things known to work.

Conclusion

This paper describes the issues in deciding how to locate technology transfer resources within a research institution.  In a single-site institution it is best to have a single, centralised TTO; and to avoid a distributed model across departments.  In a multi-site institution adopting a hub and spoke model is the best way to satisfy the need for local ‘home team’ presence combined with central expertise and resources.  It will often make sense for the central hub to be supported by a third party supplying external expertise.