Feature
Technology Transfer as Idea,
Business Generator
February 23, 2007
A Q&A with Bill Brizzard, director of technology transfer for IU Bloomington
Bill Brizzard, Ph.D., is the director of technology transfer for Indiana University Bloomington.
For a director of technology transfer, it helps to know how things work, intellectual property-wise, in both academe and industry. Bill Brizzard has such knowledge in spades. Brizzard has a Ph.D. in molecular biology. He's been a biology professor at DePaul University and also worked in industry, first at the Eastman Kodak Company and later at the Biotechnology Division of the Sigma-Aldrich Corporation. So when it comes to helping ideas stumbled upon in a university lab make it out into the world of buying and selling as marketable products, Brizzard is well equipped. He spoke to the IU Life Sciences Initiative about how technology transfer — and the relationships it can foster between the university and business worlds — can benefit us all.
Many people don't know what "tech transfer" is or the role it plays at research universities. How do you explain it?
The basic idea is that ideas have to come from somewhere, and lots of ideas for new products, especially in the sciences, come from research done at universities. The job of technology transfer is to take research developed at a university and move it into the commercial realm. That can take the form of working with existing companies to develop products or helping researchers form new companies.
How does the tech transfer process work?
It starts when a faculty member contacts us about a new idea they've come across in the lab. Our job is to evaluate the idea, look into patent protection, if that's appropriate, and then do a market evaluation.
With the idea begin to move from "idea" to "commercial product."
That's right. And that doesn't always happen the way you expect it to. It's not always obvious which ideas are going to pan out. But the bottom line is that corporations are in business to make money. They're looking for something that's going to give them a competitive edge and grow their business. Depending on the size of a company, it may not have its own R&D department, so its leaders look elsewhere, and particularly at universities, for fresh ideas.
How is Indiana doing in terms of life sciences tech transfer?
Well, our strengths are easy to speak to. We've got several major life sciences-related companies, including Cook, Eli Lilly, and Baxter. And we're got great research universities like IU, Purdue, Notre Dame, and others. From where I sit, then, one major challenge is to get the university world and the corporate world together even more than they already are. Ideas flowing from academia to business has a long history, but technology transfer as an institutionalized process, so to speak, is relatively new. So we're still learning how to communicate and make the process work.
