University Times

During the fiscal year that ended June 30, Pitt earned $4.8 million in licensing income from technologies and inventions developed by its faculty, up from about $1 million in each of the two previous fiscal years.

Arthur Boni, director of Pitt's Office of Technology Management, said the University administration hopes to increase technology transfer income here to $10-15 million within the next four years.

Such an increase would elevate Pitt into the top dozen universities in technology transfer revenue. Currently, Pitt ranks about 25th, Boni said.

Pitt is "moving along quite nicely" toward its goal of maximizing income from licenses on faculty-developed technologies and inventions, the chairperson of a special Board of Trustees committee on technology transfer told the board June 25.

Frank Mosier credited the excellence of Pitt faculty research, aggressive pursuit of technology transfer opportunities by the University's two-year-old Office of Technology Management, and an unusually high level of interest and participation by trustees and top University management in technology transfer.

Mosier said his committee concluded that the right procedures and processes are in place at the University to maximize technology transfer income — the question that board chairperson J. Wray Connolly assigned the committee to investigate when he appointed it last spring.

Mosier's committee recommended a "modest" increase in the Office of Technology Management staff (currently comprised of four full-time professionals, including Boni) and appointing a permanent committee of trustees, Pitt personnel and outside experts to evaluate the commercial viability of research here. "We're now relying exclusively on internal sources to make those decisions," said Mosier, pointing out that many universities call on outsiders to help judge which faculty research is marketable.

Commercial gain does not, and should not, drive the University's research mission, he emphasized.

"Great technology does not always bring commercial opportunity. In other words, we can't always measure the quality of [University] research based upon whether or not it's commer-cializable and makes money," said Mosier, who is a former chairperson of the Ohio state government's Science and Technology Council and of the Technology Leadership Council of Northeast Ohio, in addition to being retired vice chairman of the BP America Advisory Board.

According to Mosier, consultants who met with his committee made the following observations: * Given the amount of sponsored research funding that Pitt receives annually (about $250 million), the University should be spinning off two-to-three new companies per year — fewer than the trustees' stated goal of five new start-up companies per year. Compared with negotiating licensing agreements with existing companies to market Pitt-developed technologies, creating new companies "is a very human resources-intensive, time-consuming and expensive alternative under the most positive circumstances, and should be the exception rather than the rule," Mosier said.

* Only a small fraction of start-up companies succeed as profitable enterprises.

* "There is a lack of enthusiasm in the investment community for early stage investing in start-up companies, particularly [companies marketing technologies] from university research," Mosier said. "This is particularly true in the fields of biomedicine and biotechnology, where it's an 8-10 year process to take an idea to the point of commercial success. These ventures also tend to be high-risk and capital-intensive." * University leaders and state lawmakers prefer that local start-up companies remain local, generating jobs close to home. Last year, for example, Pitt trustees set a goal of creating 1,000 new jobs in the region within five years through technology transfer, and 10,000 jobs within 10 years. But the northern United States is short on experienced entrepreneurs, and other parts of the country are more nurturing of small high-tech companies. "To move technology forward quite often requires moving" geographically, Mosier said.

— Bruce Steele