Cleveland Clinic Innovations – Creating A Global Innovation Engine

At a recent medical device conference, a prominent physician from a large academic medical center called tech transfer, as it’s traditionally practiced at most academic centers “an arcane process that takes forever and generates very little.” Indeed, he went on, too often tech transfer programs are “a major obstacle to good ideas.” Most tech transfer executives are “way overworked and way underpaid with too much on their plates.” Worse, he went on, doctors today frequently grow “paranoid and become unwilling to share their ideas” with their tech transfer offices. “I’m willing to bet that there are a lot of good ideas just lying around,” he concluded, because of the inherent difficulties and frustrations physicians face in working with tech transfer offices.

He’s far from alone. All over the country, physician/inventors bemoan the state of tech transfer, charging that offices designed largely...