Just in case you were wondering what in the heck John Wolpert has been doing in Australia with the BRIDGE project, here's an update:
Nine Months:
I'm here at the BIO Conference in San Francisco and had a minute to reflect on the past nine months since first going to Australia. Nine months - seems appropriate. In the nine months since October, 2003, we conceived, incubated, and delivered a new business called BRIDGE Services. I remain cautiously optimistic that we have something sustainable here.
New news: We have received additional backing from the Federal Government of Australia - the Commonwealth - as well as the Victorian State Government. Federal announcements will be made later this year. With all Members on board, the operation is now successfully bootstrapped.
We have selected two more remarkable people to join the BRIDGE team. We've been overwhelmed by the quality and numbers of willing candidates who want to work for us full-time as Trusted Intermediaries. These are people with years of experience and great reputations: PhDs, deep science credentials, Law Degrees, MBAs, and experience managing inter-corporate negotiations from mergers&acquisitions to IP licensing. They are managing directors, executives, full professors. We will keep hiring them as the membership grows.
Kickoff:
It's one thing to start something - another to make it work. Last week we had our first day "on the job," a kickoff with one of the members. We conducted BRIDGE interviews and found new strategic intentions and undisclosed inventions - and there is a lot more yet to find even here - even in one of the smaller firms in the membership. Until now, I had the worry that once we began, we wouldn't find anything interesting to justify what we do as Trusted Intermediaries. One less thing to lose sleep over.
Next step is finding workable connections, and this is also less of a worry now - even the small amount of information we have collected is leading to interesting new insights, some of which I expect will be valuable for the members. Just working through our members' ideas is more fun than I can remember having in any job.
BIO:
And that brings us to the present. This is BRIDGE's first appearance at the annual BIO conference. Thanks to the Victorian Government, we have presence at the event, even though we were a late comer. We held a coordination meeting for our members on Saturday, which was a value in spite of most of us being bleary-eyed with jet lag. I will be at the event throughout the week. The word is getting out that talking to me as a trusted intermediary is like talking to ten companies at once. Lots of party invitations. :)
Lab Tour:
After the BIO event, I will be visiting two of IBM's research labs, where we have scheduled two kickoffs and many researcher interviews. Looking forward to this, and to seeing old friends on Thursday/Friday in California and Monday/Tuesday of next week in Armonk and Watson, New York.
UC Berkeley:
For the past two weeks, we have had the pleasure of working with a UC Berkeley Haas School of Business PhD candidate who is doing his thesis on inter-corporate innovation practices. He is studying BRIDGE in particular. He has already provided good insights into the operation. Looking forward to seeing what he produces. His name is Simon Wakeman. Let me know if you would like to talk with him about your innovation practices as well.
Press:
The press on BRIDGE continues to come in. We post links and PDFs to www.innovationxchange.com.au/bridgeinnovation. (Ed. note: Check out the press release on the official May 2004 launch here, a Q&A with John Wolpert here, and a ZDNet Australia article here.)
Coming soon to a country near you:
I've been getting more requests to bring BRIDGE to additional countries, including the US, Europe and Asia-Pac. While we will resist growing too quickly, it seems likely that a global expansion will happen one company at a time over the next year.
Things are working out. I'm glad to know that you are out there cheering for us.
________________________
John Wolpert
Executive, BRIDGE Services
Australian Industry InnovationXchange
AU - 61 409 163 030
johnw -at- bridgeinnovation.com
Information about BRIDGE Services: www.innovationxchange.com.au/bridgeinnovation
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
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?
Comments (1)
| Category: Bridge Project
October 28, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
John sent this link to a videotape of the 10-minute speech he delivered on Oct. 15 to the Australian Parliament and 250 scientists at the Parliament Building in Canberra. When you follow the link, John is the "First Presenter." The "Final Speaker" link goes to shows a senior official commenting on the concepts from the speech. John's specific topic: how to accelerate corporate innovation, what we can do to build national economic growth by bridging barriers between firms, and how "intermediated innovation practices" might work.
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| Category: Bridge Project | Commercialization | Innovation, General | Open Innovation | Technology
October 23, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Well, now we know why we haven't heard much from John Wolpert lately. He's been in Australia, busily spreading the Open Innovation gospel. He surfaced today long enough to email us a link to an interview he did with the ABC radio network (the Australian equivalent of NPR). While in Australia, John also addressed the Australian Parliament and the Innovation Exchange about Open Innovation. When he gets back we'll twist his arm to get him to post some of his impressions!
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| Category: Bridge Project | Commercialization | Innovation, General | Law & Policy | Open Innovation | Technology
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is 
