John Wolpert, who moved to Australia to start up the BRIDGE Innovation Project (about which more in a later post), sent this from the BIO conference:

So I'm at the BIO event in San Francisco this week (a quick trip up from Sydney, and first time back in the States since we launched BRIDGE), and just stepped out of a session on University commercialization involving Offices of Technology Transfer (OTTs). In the past twenty years, OTTs have come to the front of the interface between academic research and business. The up-side of this is that OTTs (the best of them) add a layer of sophistication and benefit from learning-curve effects - one does not need to reinvent the wheel each time one wants to license technology developed by a professor or student team at Uni. On the down side, there remains a significant time suck between realizing one should talk with a University team and getting the deal done (depending on the circumstances). With sophistication comes greater bargaining power and a third party- the university itself - that wants to extract maximum rents on what is often blue sky. (The effort of maximizing rents on highly uncertain territory is always a time consumer.)

This particular seminar involved hypothetical play-acting of a number of deal scenarios, with different panelists playing the various roles in a corporate/university negotiation. And what I noticed was that all of the dancing around in negotiation was about not knowing each other, not trusting, and having to get to know each other at - from my perspective - a very late stage where the research is already baked and up "for sale."

Hypothesis: When companies get involved with university R&D at the very earliest stages - before patents have been filed, and before anyone knows where the research will go - the relationship evolves naturally, and when some fruit comes out of it, the commercialization or tech transfer negotiation is more a matter of formality and more quickly negotiated. What do you think? Likely? Am I missing an angle?