It’s already been almost two months since we landed in Finland after our time in Chicago. The Kellogg-project is slowly but surely coming to an end for our part – since the beginning of October, we’ve been working hard at the Technology Transfer Office of Åbo Akademi. Our contract ends on December 31^st, so there’s still about a month time to get stuff done.

A big part of our time so far has been committed to the planning and execution of the Business Essentials for Scientists, i.e. the BES-course. I think we have succeeded well in making the course interesting for the students; everyone really seems enthusiastic while taking part in the lectures.

I have been inspired by the lectures and the course participants as well, and genuinely feel like we’ve managed to create a great atmosphere for experiencing and learning new things. The content of a course is always important, but almost equally important, in my opinion at least, is to get people excited about their future prospects. There’s been a sort of “anything is possible” ethos, which has stuck to many of the students. I’ve heard some pretty interesting start-up ideas people have started thinking more seriously about. What the folks in Silicon Valley have realized long ago is that in order to do great things, we must dream big.

The last course day was a few days ago, on Tuesday 24^th of November. I’m sad to see the course come to an end, but really happy I got the opportunity to be a part of organizing it. Mostly though, I’m happy to have met all of the participants and lecturers.

Now, after the course has ended, it’s time to fully concentrate on other things. And boy, are there things to concentrate on. As stated earlier, there’s still plenty to do at ÅA before the end of the year.

I am afraid I will be swamped with too many things next year, which will result in inefficiencies in all of them. I feel like it’s important to be able to say no to something that might seem really intriguing in order to be able to follow through on the things one has already committed oneself to.

Whatever happens, it’s going to be one heck of a spring.

-Lauri

It’s been way too long since the last post, and we are sorry for that. We got taken by surprise by how abruptly our time in the US seemed to come to an end. It’s funny how these things go: you start a new project and remember thinking how great it’s going to be. Next comes the blurry part, where you experience all sorts of great things and learn a bunch of stuff. And before you know it, it’s the last week and you’re busy making arrangements to return to your normal routines. Or flying to California to see San Francisco, Yosemite National Park and Lake Tahoe, as was the case for me. Anyway, it’s been hectic.

It’s hard to quantify or even to qualify all the things I’ve learned. I think my brain is still going through everything I’ve experienced, trying to put things in the right place. I know I’ve learned a lot about tech transfer, which is a skill I’m certain will benefit me greatly in the future. I still need to go over the notes I took from the Management for Scientists and Engineers –course at Kellogg. Most of the lectures I had the privilege of participating in were, quite simply, the best I’ve ever experienced. I’ve adopted a new mindset too: the American way of getting things done really rubbed off on me.

One feeling sits on top of everything else – I’m immensely grateful for the opportunity I was given when I was chosen for the Kellogg project. I know the experiences over the last three months will help me in whatever I choose to pursue next year.

Now is the time to give back; I have three months to work my hardest at helping the commercialization efforts at ÅA. There are some incredibly interesting projects going on, some of which I’m sure you’ll hear about at some point in the future!

There is another way in which we want to give back to Åbo Akademi. We are organizing a course called Business Essentials for Scientists (BES) in November 2015. We are super excited for the course – a bunch of really inspirational speakers have already agreed to tell us about their experiences in topics such as starting your own company, how to pitch your business idea, how to get financed, patenting and commercializing your research as well as digitalization and disruption. We think this is something every scientist should be a part of!

The course is aimed for all doctoral students at Åbo Akademi University. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with your questions – shoot me an e-mail at lfalck@abo.fi, also if you’d be interested in enrolling on the course.

More information on the course will be available shortly! Until then!

-Lauri

Hi again!

We are back with another post from Chicago, where we are participating in a unique collaboration between Åbo Akademi and Northwestern University. We’ve come here to work with technology transfer, and will try to explain in this blog post why it is important.

One could think of tech transfer as a bridge that spans the gap between academia and the private sector: it helps to develop early stage intellectual property (IP) into new research tools for the use of scientists, or into new products or services for public use. Tech transfer also helps foster collaborations between researchers from different universities to advance a certain technology. Ultimately it might lead to licensing of the technology, sponsored research opportunities or the creation of a start-up (we’ll talk about these in more detail later). Even the university benefits from the process: it is able to retain intellectual property rights to the invention and fund more research with the licensing income generated by its IP portfolio. If the end result is something that benefits the public, it’s a win-win-win-win.

The problem however is this: not many scientists are aware that their research could be commercialized.

Even if the researcher would be aware of the possible practical implications of his or her invention, they necessarily wouldn’t have an idea on where to start: finding and obtaining the resources or knowledge needed for building a prototype, researching if something similar already exists and finding out if someone would be interested in their service, product or platform.

But fret not: this is exactly why technology transfer offices exist. They are experts at answering these types of questions.

Here’s an example: Lyrica was invented at Northwestern University. Thanks to the combined efforts of the inventor and the tech transfer office, the pharmaceutical was successfully patented and licensed to Pfizer, one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world. The drug has helped better the quality of millions of people’s lives, while providing the university with enormous licensing income, allowing for the financing of even more research.

So is technology transfer important for a University? Absolutely! It contributes to scientific research by creating new tools, fostering new collaborations and providing the income needed to fund more research. If a new start-up is formed around an invention, new jobs are created in the process. Most importantly, as we have seen with Lyrica, technology transfer has led to new products and services that improve our quality of life.  From new cancer treatments to faster modems, from environmentally friendly metal processing to beautiful flowering plants, technology transfer from academic institutions is advancing the way we live and work.

If you want to learn more about technology transfer, check out this link.

Hello!

We, Oskar Karlström and Lauri Falck, are two researchers from Åbo Akademi, and we’ve been in Chicago, US, since June. We have the privilege of participating in a unique collaboration between our home university and Northwestern University (NU). During our time here, we have been working at the Innovation and New Ventures Office (INVO) at NU, with something called technology transfer.

What exactly is technology transfer? Tech transfer is a term used to describe a formal transfer of rights to use and commercialize new discoveries and innovations resulting from scientific research to another party. Sounds logical enough, right? Universities typically transfer technology through protecting (using patents and copyrights), and then licensing new innovations.

But why are we at NU? The tech transfer office at NU (INVO) is, and has been for quite some time, one of the absolute best in the world at translating innovations from the university into commercial products that benefit both the university and the public (see link).

Our mission as participants of this collaboration is to learn as much as possible about the tech transfer process at NU and bring valuable insight back to our home university in order to improve the technology transfer activities there. A sponge is a good analogy for our role: trying to suck up as much information as possible during our internship, and then squeezing that out at ÅA.

During the first eight weeks of our stay we have also been participating in a course called Management for Scientists and Engineers at Kellogg School of Management – one of the best business schools in the world.

More information on why technology transfer is important and how the course has helped us understand the business side of things will follow later.

Lauri and Oskar