Commercialisation Office

In Australia we have universities and in each university you will find a commercialisation office tasked with spinning out innovative technologies.

Four things are certain about these commercialisation offices:

1. The academics will hate them because “they don’t serve our needs”. I wouldn’t count this one against the commercialisation offices.

2. The people that run any one of them will have previously been in a similar job at another university in Australia or the UK.

3. They will be eternally cash flow negative.

4. At any moment by some weird consensus they will all promote commercialisation by either startups or, alternatively, licensing.

Right now the buggers are swinging back to licensing just as the global licensing model is collapsing as a result of the changes to the US patent and patent enforcement regimes.

It’s like they are totally unaware or it just doesn’t matter.

I suspect both.