Reference no: EM132913571

Case Analysis 8: North Carolina State University Company Background

The essence of a university is more than education-it is the advancement and dissemination of knowledge in all its forms. For leading research institutions like North Carolina State University, part of the university's mission is fulfilled by the Office of Technology Transfer (OTT).

The function of the OTT is that of a sophisticated matchmaker. Its small staff of highly trained licensing professionals-many of whom have advanced degrees and are technology experts in their own right-seeks to find opportunities to license and ultimately commercialize NC State's knowledge assets. These a commercialize NC State's knowledge assets. These are usually promising new technologies or inventions created at the university, covering every field of endeavor from materials to biomedicine and more. "Our goal is to see actual consumer benefit come from the research conducted at NC State," says Billy Houghteling, executive director of the OTT.

The six licensing professionals in the NC State OTT are very good at what they do. Today, over 100 products in the marketplace are based on work done at NC State.

Those successes represent the cream of the crop. Each year, more than 150 new developments come in to the OTT, to add to the university's store of approximately 3,000 technology assets. Each is reviewed by one of the staff, and the most promising are pursued in depth. The professional assigned to the offering works to become a subject matter become a subject matter expert on the technology, t expert on the technology, then starts looking for companies that might be starts looking for companies that might be interest interested in licensing, developing and marketing it.

"We need to find the optimal partner for each case," Houghteling says. "This can be difficult and challenging, because the market opportunities for any given asset are not always clear. It's a complex triage process; we need to not only understand the technology itself, but also its commercial potential. And then we need to find the partner that can realize that potential effectively. It goes back to our purpose... it's not just to license, but to see success in the marketplace."

The process often takes from four to six months. Given the volume of new technologies being submitted to the OTT and the size of the staff, it can be virtually impossible for the office to keep pace. Added to this heavy workload is ongoing financial pressure brought about by a difficult economic climate. As a state institution, the university is facing austere times and the extra revenue brought in by technology licensing is of great benefit.

One of the main issues faced by the OTT licensing professionals is dealing with the vast number of data sources available to them. Online databases, websites, publications and much more have to be searched to find that proverbial needle in a haystack-the perfect development partner. "This can be a truly daunting challenge," says Houghteling. "It's just not practical for us to search for us to search every possible source of informati every possible source of information.

"For example, a great deal of valuable information about the marketplace and potential development partners can be found in the myriad reports and databases provided by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Unfortunately Commission. Unfortunately, the potential return , the potential return on the time it takes to find the right places to look is so low that it's not practical to dig very deep.

The result is that good opportunities may go by the wayside. Ironically, the OTT professionals are fully capable and qualified to find them; they simply don't have the time or resources to uncover those potential partners. "What we really need is analytics to help us," Houghteling notes. "With the right tools, we can make that part of the process a great deal more efficient, which translates directly to more opportunities to see university research reach the marketplace."

"We had a very clearly defined set of requirements," Houghteling states. "Speed, of course, since that was a key challenge. But equally important was key challenge. But equally important was utility; s utility; speed is nothing if the answers are not useful to the licensing professional, so the output needed to be easily consumed and relevant; free of clutter and unrelated leads. The system also had to be user-friendly, to reduce workload. And of course, it had to produce better results than we could achieve on better results than we could achieve on our own."

Questions

1. Identify what the business objective is.

2. Identify how predictive analytics was used to solve the business problem. Explain how the predictive analytics solution works.

3. How can analytics culture be built in the company?

4. Identify another possible predictive analytics solution similar to this that can be helpful in another industry.