Vanderbilt University takes tech to marketplace

For the fiscal year ending in June, the university received $5.1 million in revenues from technology already in the marketplace. The revenue growth curve is at about 30 percent annually, and in the last four years revenue has tripled.

The development and transfer of new technologies and intellectual property to full-blown commercial success is an important goal of Vanderbilt University. So much so that the school has established its own department to help promising ventures developed by its faculty reach the marketplace.

The purpose of the Office of Technology Transfer and Enterprise Development (OTTED) is to connect technologies developed by Vanderbilt scientists, engineers and physicians with the commercial sector through various means.

“We look for the most effective approach, using different resources, to get our technologies to commercialization,” said Christopher McKinney, director of Vanderbilt’s OTTED. “Our [only] bias is finding the best path.”

Technology can be transferred to the market sector through mechanisms such as licensing agreements with established companies. Or it can be done through various forms of enterprise development, in which the university helps establish and finance a new company to bring a new technology to market.

Technology transfer was formally set up at Vanderbilt in 1990. In 1998, the Chancellor’s Fund was created to invest in new ventures, and the university established enterprise development in 1999.

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