6 Habits of a Successful Commercialisation Office Manager

Key characteristics of the perfect manager of a commercialisation office in an Australian university.

1. Thought leadership. The most important part of the job is to create the impression that the university is very active in commercialisation despite the fact that they are not. This means endless presentations to media, businesses, academics and community groups. Also you have to hit social media very hard – just cut and paste some posts from an American university; nobody will notice.

2. Stakeholder management. Academics will think think that you are there to serve their needs. The best way to deal with this is to gift them their ‘IP’ and watch them do nothing.

3. Suck it up. You will be going to endless ‘management’ meetings and you just have to say ‘yes’ to every loopy idea. Later on just ask for extra resources off the VC or sub-VC in order to prosecute these ideas, which will be denied. You can thus pass the buck.

4. If by some miracle something really good comes up don’t get involved at all because you will just stuff it up. Let the free market reign but make sure you take the credit after the fact.

5. Keep your budget down. Nature abhors a large target. Don’t have any external costs at all to any service providers especially patent attorneys. If you can’t avoid these for any reason then push the costs back on the department from whence the desire to commercialise arose.

6. Start an incubator for students. Make it as much like a large kid’s castle as you can and promote the buggery out of it on social media.