The FLC National Meeting Sessions are divided by career pathways to help you make the most of your professional development. Listed below are the concurrent session descriptions:
Building Accessible Pathways for Historically Marginalized Entrepreneurs to Bring Technologies from Lab to Market
The objective of this discussion is to explore challenges and solutions for entrepreneurs and small businesses exploring Federal Lab advanced technologies. Co-presenters, Christopher Campbell and Megan Holcomb, will discuss their journey in navigating tech transfer opportunities, both personally and on behalf of underrepresented entrepreneurs such as women, minority ethnic groups, and non-technical founders. This session highlights how (1) collaborative efforts provide unique development opportunities for labs and industry (examples from advanced manufacturing), (2) a longer view of tech transfer engagement can bridge hidden resource gaps (examples from a climate tech incubator), and (3) building mini-ecosystems can help usher technologies across the lab-to-market landscape.
The Role of Federal Labs in Building Communities of Innovation Under the Multi-Billion Dollar CHIPS + Science Act
The CHIPS + Science Act provides billions of dollars in applied research funding to multiple regional programs and initiatives that highly relevant to technology transfer. Examples include the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engines program, Economic Development Administration (EDA) Regional Technology and Innovation Hubs, Small Business Administration (SBA) Regional Innovation Clusters and Department of Defense (DoD) Microelectronics Commons. This session will give an overview of the regional programs and players in this space and explore strategies for federal technology transfer professionals to leverage the regional initiatives to enhance T2 outcomes.
De-Risking Early-Stage Federal Innovations: Programs and Resources for Government Researchers
The lack of early-stage capital and de-risking support is a major challenge in advancing promising biomedical (and other) technologies from research labs to commercial and investment partners. There are many federally funded or partnered gap funding programs and accelerators setup to help bridge the valley of death for technologies developed by universities, hospitals and small businesses – but what about early-stage government research? How can government researchers help bridge the gap so that their technologies are licensable? This session will overview some currently available resources and funding opportunities applicable to government researchers that support proof-of-concept studies and increasing the commercialization potential of government inventions.
The FLEX Program
At this presentation, you will learn how the FLC's Federal Lab Education Accelerator (FLEX) can help you get your federal technologies out the door and into the market. Launched in 2021 as a pilot program out of the FLC Mid-Atlantic Region, FLEX builds long-term collaborations between federal labs and academic institutions by connecting entrepreneurial MBA students with federal labs technology portfolios. The students get to select licensable technologies as the subject of an entrepreneurial element of a business course and gain critical real-world market research experience on federal technologies. The labs benefit from the student market assessments, a critical step in commercializing federal technologies. FLEX has now expanded to all FLC regions, and all federal labs are invited to join. Currently, more than 20 federal labs and 10 universities are participating in FLEX, with the FLEX portfolio including more than 100 federal technologies. This panel will provide more details on FLEX, describe how it is benefiting both federal labs and universities, and explain how you can participate.
T2 Award Winners Panel: Targeting and Improving the Impact of Technology Transfer Activities
This thematic panel discussion will feature some of this year’s National Award winners, who will discuss their technology transfer efforts that helped turn federal innovations into commercialized products.
American-Made: National Labs Creating a Fast Track to the Clean Energy Revolution!
This session will discuss the American-Made Program, powered by the Department of Energy and administered by the NREL. This will provide an overview about the prizes that are accelerating innovation, the network that is supporting innovators and the vouchers that can open doors to the national labs. The session will also explain relevant prizes, including the Office of Technology Transitions Lab MATCH (Laboratory Making Advanced Technology Commercialization Harmonized) Prize, which is geared toward accelerating national lab IP commercialization.
Wolves on the Prowl: Knowing the Threats and Protecting Your Lab’s Intellectual Property
This session is a primer on the threats to labs from industrial/foreign espionage and theft and how to best mitigate those risks.
AI in T2: What Can It Do?
This session will discuss artificial intelligence and its impact on T2.
Career Development Strategies for Tech Transfer Professionals and Recent Trends in Hiring and Retaining Staff
The Bayh-Dole Act has had a tremendous impact on economic development and led to the growth of the technology transfer profession. While the field continues to grow, identifying talent to meet the demand is increasingly difficult. Many offices do not have the polices, or the desire, to embrace creative approaches for talent acquisition. This panel will shed light on some of these barriers, provide suggestions to overcome them and identify, train, and source talented professionals.
Overview of the Latest Case Law and Legislation
The courts play a key role in interpreting T2 laws. This session will provide an expert overview of some of the key cases and their impact on the practice of technology transfer.
The Role of AI in Tech Transfer Offices
This session will address how AI can be harnessed by Tech Transfer Offices (TTOs) to enhance the efficiency and efficacy of TTO workflows. A critical exploration of AI's role in automating routine tasks will follow, liberating TTO professionals from administrative burdens and enabling them to redirect their expertise towards strategic endeavors. Examples will be provided and queries shared.
DefTech Academy: Educating Businesses to Save Time for T2 Offices
The DefTech Academy was created in collaboration with and in response to needs outlined by DoD T2 professionals, specifically focused on DoD engagement mechanisms. The purpose is to create efficiency for both businesses and the T2 offices they engage with by taking business through a series of courses before they engage with T2. Gaining a broader understanding of what T2 Offices wish businesses knew before, where bottlenecks are created, and how we can help business prepare reduces time and costs for businesses and reduces the burden on overburdened T2 staff. This session could help create a conversation around tools and techniques for creating efficiencies for T2 offices.
Designing Your Spin-In Agreement for the Best Payoff
Spin-in, using CRADAs and other T2 agreements, can indicate the most productive directions for government to develop new approaches based on technologies outside the government. For significant payoff, spin-in requires more than signing up an industry or academic partner to show their techniques – even a well-structured project can encounter friction, fragmentation and frustration. This session presents experiences and lessons learned about how to foster smooth, successful spin-in partnerships that greatly benefit federal and non-federal parties and how to avoid pitfalls in choosing partners, setting goals, conducting research and developing research findings.
Use the Manufacturing Extension Partnership to Help Your Commercialization Partners
Are your CRADA partners or licensees struggling to manufacture their new products or processes? The Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) helps small manufacturers achieve operational excellence, and its MEP Advanced Technology Team (MATT) specifically helps U.S. small manufacturers overcome development hurdles through partnering. The program specializes in creating technology partnerships between companies and research labs. MATT can help manufacturers facing challenges in many areas such as developing new products or enhancing old ones, enhancing their data collection or use, and problem-solving for products. This session will describe MEP’s services and introduce new offerings from the MEP Advanced Tech Team.
GOGOs, GOCOs and the Space Between
There are significant differences in operation and procedures between GOCO-type agencies and GOGO facilities. Despite commonalities, there are differences in how each views software, types of IP available and overall office structures. This session will discuss similarities and differences, including on the topics of CRADAs and other collaborative efforts.
Senior DoD Science and Technology Session
Learn about the DoD Science and Technology (S&T) enterprise, including S&T workforce and lab infrastructure policy, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers and University-Affiliated Research Centers.
USPTO and NOAA: Understanding and Optimizing Invention Disclosure Rates
The USPTO and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) recently partnered in a collaborative study of the current factors influencing invention disclosure rates across NOAA’s research workforce. This panel session is an opportunity for USPTO and NOAA to share the study methodology with the FLC community and create space for T2 experts from other labs to share their own invention disclosure success stories and lessons learned. Through this group knowledge-sharing approach, T2 professionals will benefit from these insights so that they may more impactfully protect and encourage innovation within their own lab. The session will include a brief overview of the USPTO/NOAA study design, short presentations by T2 panelists about their approaches to optimizing invention disclosure rates and a panel discussion.
NCATS Advances Translational Research via Collaborations and the Synergistic Blending of Extramural and Intramural Programs
The NIH is a unique biomedical institution that is both a granting agency that funds external research and is a research enterprise that carries out in-house research. This unique vantage point allows the NIH to make maximum synergistic use of the most consequential U.S. laws enacted in the early 1980s: the Bayh-Dole Act, the Federal Technology Transfer Act (FTTA) and the Small Business Innovation Acts. The panel will discuss how collaborations form the backbone of translating National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) research findings into treatments for human diseases. This session will explain the different agreement types most often used in T2 collaborations that result in inventions, patents and licensing; explain the cooperative agreements (CA) with "U" activity codes as support mechanisms for high-priority research; and examine the synergy between extramural and intramural programs at the NIH involving universities and small businesses.
DoD Workshop
DOE Workshop
Beyond Patents & Contracts: Measuring the True Impact of a Technology Transfer Program
In 2022, the Office of Technology Transfer at the NIH engaged RTI International, a nonprofit research institute, to develop new methods for characterizing and measuring the impact of technologies developed by NIH’s Intramural Research Program. The RTI team created models to illustrate how technologies that NIH licensed to firms contribute to the stimulation of the U.S. biomedical innovation system, economic activity and national and global public health. In 2023 this study was expanded to include Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs). This session will look at the results of this work and consider other models of technology transfer impact such as AUTM’s Better World Project and models from the Department of Defense.
DoD Workshop
DOE Workshop