The Tech Entrepreneurship Blog

where technology and entrepreneurship meet

Take your Late Nights Early in the Game

1 Comment Posted by on January 2, 2013

I was reflecting over the holidays about my university days working on grant applications after an email from an inventor about a team grant that “was much less straight forward than hoped.”  The second I read the word ‘team’ visions of last minute faxes, conference calls, and strategically timed document revisions came to mind.

There is something truly magical about a team coalescing on a vision of what they wish to achieve, and downright chaotic about the planning of it. No matter how far ahead of the game you may believe yourself to be, all it takes is one good idea (or overlooked expectation within the team) to cascade into an application revision.  Sure it’s all ‘make believe’ at this stage, but the hypothetical scenario that you describe will have very real implications for your probability of success and the resources you are granted… not to mention what you will have buy-in from your team to do once there are real dollars on the table.  Partnership and team grants are the worst for these kinds of changes, because there are so many players involved.

Anyone who thinks that researcher’s don’t understand what a sales pitch is, is sadly mistaken.  They just have a different audience with different expectations. They are perhaps even more subject to political whims.  And just like in the startup world, most grants will not succeed.  While the odd program has an exceptionally high success rate (~ 50%), in North America the majority fall somewhere between 10-20%, and success rates under 10% are common for the most competitive programs.  That’s right up there with the ‘9 out of 10 startups’ will fail statistic.  And while as faculty most researchers have some baseline stability, they are dependent on grant monies to enable their most ambitious and impactful academic pursuits through reduced teaching load, materials, equipment, and staff: Staff who only continue to exist so long as the money keeps coming in, and their job descriptions match a funder’s allowable expenses.

It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the chaos of the grant application process means that planning plays a less critical role.  In fact, it’s the reverse.  One of the most impactful moments in my career was the first grant application I helped bring to completion ahead of time.  I remember vividly four of us standing around our meeting table, looking down at the hard copies of the application, and the PI saying something like, ‘We must have forgotten something.  Can we really be done?’ We did a double check to confirm that it was, and instead of going out for a celebratory drink, we all went home early feeling a bit stunned from the lack of adrenaline.

The bottom line though, is that we had all nearly killed ourselves enough over past grant applications to have been committed to avoid doing so this time around.  To ensure we managed to do this, we took the time to scope out the work, dependencies, and milestones as soon as we had determined the grant target.  It’s worth noting that developing this map took relatively little time, but allowed us to appreciate the work and the critical timelines. This allowed us to flip the ‘mission critical’ switch early in the game, and put our late nights in early.  This accomplished three things: 1) Work was completed at a stage early enough that there was limited temptation to cut corners, sacrificing quality, 2) We managed to avoid hitting any blind spots in the application process by effectively managing communication about the critical timelines to everyone involved, and 3) We kept ourselves ahead enough of the game that we had the breathing room to handle the unexpected and last minute (in other words, the inevitable) more effectively.

Let’s face it, it’s thrilling to get things done just under the wire, but a huge risk to bank on your ability to do so. And despite the best planning and foresight, the unpredictable may always make ‘crunch time’ a crunch.  Understanding the work, and taking your late nights early in the game will help shelter you from the worst case scenario.

General ,

Building the Future of Ladies in Science

Leave a Comment Posted by on October 16, 2012

The issue of women in entrepreneurship and technology has been a bit of a preoccupation for me in the past few months, largely because despite our company’s commitment to diversity, we get very few female applicants.  Where are all the ladies who want to build businesses and work with cutting edge technology? For whatever reason, at the intersection of VC investment and tech women are underrepresented.

And so, as the academic type that I am, this weekend I had the good fortune to find myself at the McGill Women in Science, Engineering and Medicine Symposium in celebration of Carrie Derick, who became Canada’s first female professor.  The event seemed all the more a propos given the recently published US study finding that both male and female scientists rate CVs with a female name lower than the same CV with a male name on applicant’s perceived competence, hireability, and mentorability. The starting salaries respondents would be willing to offer the CVs with female names were also significantly lower. Ouch.

But I think the challenge for everyone, in and outside academia, is to understand how to tackle these largely unconscious biases we all have.  Because ultimately, in the words of NSERC President Suzanne Fortier, “The future is not for us to imagine, but for us to build.”

The female scientists who spoke at the symposium generally did not feel actively discriminated against, and all of them felt they were able to have successful personal as well as professional lives.  But, if I dare lean on the anecdotal science of Julie Payette (Astronauts are the best), the struggle is no longer for the top 10%, it is for the majority of people of average aptitude, and it is for the very definition of ‘normal’.  Our prejudices (gender or otherwise) actually have a whole lot to do with what we have learned from experience is ‘normal’. Until we approach gender parity in any group, our idea of the ‘norm’ for that group will be biased towards the dominating characteristics. The further a person is from that model of the norm, the more questions will be raised about how well they fit into that group, whether those differentiating characteristics are relevant to goodness of fit in that group or not.

Diversity has to be part of our reality before we will fully overcome our biases.  For those of us with influence over norm defining decisions (hiring, for example), that means we really need to be on our toes if we are going to create this kind of diversity. And why shouldn’t we?  There are very real benefits to diversity, from more intelligent organizations, to access larger talent pools.  We also need to prepare each other for the reality that overcoming these biases means work.

What appears to be the biggest problem for women in the more male dominated science and engineering fields right now is that while those females who make it into an undergraduate program tend to drop out along the educational trajectory at roughly the same rate as male students, very few enter into undergraduate degrees in technical fields to begin with.  You can’t help but wonder what that says about what girls are experiencing in the formative years leading up to their higher education decisions, and what inadvertent biases lead girls and boys to have very different learning experiences and opportunities. Things like recruiting boys for robotics, without approaching any girls (Don’t worry young Katie’s like me will butt in and volunteer themselves, but they’re not the only ones that could benefit from the opportunity)?

An especially poignant moment for me during the question and answer period following Payette’s talk, a young woman in the audience asked her how she dealt with self-doubt.  Payette’s response was one I never expected any human being to give; she said she never doubted herself, she just focused on her goal.  She largely credited this self-confident to very supportive parents.

Remember the stencil days?

That’s the self-confidence I want every child to grow up to have, so that they can take the risks achievement in business or academics requires, accept failure as part of the learning process, and spend their energy where it matters most – on being awesome (as an astronaut or otherwise).

Oh yeah, and make sure your daughter is proud of her grade 1 science project, even if she doesn’t get 1st place.  She was more interested in kaleidoscopes than competition anyway.

Entrepreneurship, People Management , , , ,

Where TTO Technology Listings Fail

Leave a Comment Posted by on January 3, 2012

By Katie Young Morris and Naoufel Testaouni

As project scouts for TandemLaunch, we are looking at University tech transfer websites on a regular basis.  When we saw Jeff Fearn’s advice for TTO’s to make more information available on their websites, we decided to take it a step further and highlight the common ways that website licensing listings fail to connect the right people to the right licensing opportunities.

1. Make your search results as user friendly as possible.  Step one is to make sure that your titles are clear.  Step two is to take advantage of the power of a one sentence summary description that appears with your title in the search results. While not always needed, this additional information makes it easier for people to get to the technologies they have interest in more quickly and efficiently, without overlooking technologies that do not immediately appear relevant.  Search providers like Google do this for exactly the same reason: titles don’t always give enough information.  You can further optimize the functionality of your searches by making sure that the text following each title gives as clear a picture of what the technology does as possible.

The University of British Columbia TTO’s site provides a great example of this in action:

2. Don’t tell us your technology is ‘new’.  Tell us why.  Don’t worry, we know your technology is unique, novel, new, fast, superior, just plain better than other solutions. The most important information individuals need to evaluate a technology are the concrete results that can be compared to similar solutions. Provide comparisons to similar technologies when possible. This specificity will make your opportunity descriptions more meaningful and attention grabbing.

If you indicate that the invention improves efficiency, indicate ‘by how much’. We have given an example from Queen’s University’s PARTEQ Innovation below.

Better yet?  Provide image, video, or audio results. Yissum Technology Transfer (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), for example, makes these kind of demonstration materials nearly the first thing that appears in their summaries.

 

The bottom line is that nothing will sell a technology better than results. For unfamiliar technologies, a brief video demonstrating how the technology functions will make a big difference in communicating what an opportunity is all about (costly video production is not required).

3. Important, but often forgotten information: Most university TTOs understand the importance of clearly labeling, categorizing, and describing their technologies, including listing potential applications, advantages and the problem solved (do all of these things).  Some specifics that are often missing and should strengthen your sales case are:

  • Patent numbers and types – These provide more detailed information on the technology and the scope of its protection.
  • Patent filing dates – These place the technology in the timeline of related technologies.
  • Publications – These provide more detailed information on a technology and future development.
  • Inventors’ names – A quick search on an inventor can help give a sense of the inventors’ availability, similar work they are doing that may be of interest, and additional relevant publications.

Companies that are going to license your technology will need this information before making a decision.  If you don’t have ready access to this information, consider revising your university’s disclosure or patent management process to ensure it is at your fingertips in the future.   The University of Rochester Center for Entrepreneurship is an example of a TTO that is doing a good job of providing this information.

Even better, use some of the extra time you saved by reducing unnecessary inquiries, and provide direct links.

4. Differentiate investment types. A technology status description is a powerful way to help the right kind of investor tune into your technology.  Some individuals and companies will be interested in early stage technologies, others will want some kind of proof of concept, and others will be interested in fully developed technologies.  UChicago Tech has one of the best methods we have seen to quickly summarize a technology’s development status.

5. Stop gatekeeping.  While TTOs need to be sensitive to what information should be kept confidential at different stages of a technology’s development, gatekeeping for any other reason is a waste of your time.  Some TTOs provide very scant information about their technologies. Our best guesses as to why are that they lack time, want to track interest in specific technologies, or want to get the opportunity to pitch certain technologies.  But if you don’t provide enough information about your technology, anyone who contacts you about it will not have a clear picture of what their interest in the technology is.  That means wasted time with people who are not going to license a technology anyway, and a distorted picture of what interest there really is in a technology. You also risk missing out on people who might be interested in an opportunity, but never discover it is available.

Look at the recurrent questions you are fielding and consider systematically answering those questions on your website .  If you can provide the information in response to a technology inquiry, there is likely no reason not to have it available online.  The minimal upfront time invested will save you the time of answering requests from people who only have a vague sense that a technology might be of interest, freeing you up to invest more time in relationships where there is concrete interest.

Technology Transfer, Technology Transfer Offices , ,

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