What is the best structure for a tech-transfer office?

“The optimum structure for a university TTO [tech transfer office] is for it to be a wholly owned subsidiary company of the University.” That is the view of Tom Hockaday, the Managing Director of Isis Innovation Ltd, the wholly owned subsidiary of Oxford University.

Hockaday,one of the most respected and experienced practitioners of tech transfer, comes to this conclusion in a short item on the website of Isis Innovation, What is the Best Structure for a University Technology Transfer Office? He may conclude that Oxford has it right, but Hockaday is open to other ways of doing things. As he puts it “Good people can make any system work and bad people can make any system fail.”

Hockaday makes important points that any tech transfer professional should heed. For example, he insists that “the TTO is wholly dependent upon the willingness of researchers to engage in the process, support from senior university members, and should adopt a philosophy of supporting researchers who want support”. In other words, don’t run around trying to bully researchers who simply don’t want to be involved in tech transfer.

This leads on to another issue, and one that can be a negative aspect of having a separate company. It can, he explains, “forget it is owned by a university. If the TTO starts showing off then the researchers will turn against it.”

Hockaday is too polite to name names. But anyone who has been around TTOs for any time can probably think of one or two who fall into this trap.

He is also too polite to name any of the “bad people” who have managed to make a system fail.  They still exist, despite many years of increasingly professional TTOs.

Talk to enough people and you will still hear occasional complaints that TTOs manage to get in the way, and to screw up relationships between companies and researchers who desperately want to work together. One reason that you sometimes here for these failures is the intervention of lawyers. It would be interesting to read Hockaday’s views on this aspect of tech transfer.