Program agenda:
- The inner workings and management of a faculty liaison or mentor program:
- Funding
- Oversight
- Success stories
- Metrics
- Identifying potential peer mentors and mentees
- Importance of addressing faculty reward structure to incentivize work in I&E
- Value of I&E to students, faculty, universities, and the broader communities
- Tips and tools for addressing this topic on your own campus
When it comes to fostering commercialization activity among your faculty, building solid TTO-faculty relationships is critical. And who better to nurture that relationship than “one of their own” in the form of a faculty liaison committed to driving innovation. Cultivating a faculty-led mentor program can dramatically increase disclosures, ultimately resulting in more patents, more start-ups, more licensing revenue, and bringing more advances to the marketplace for the public good.
While there are many examples of mentoring programs, one such program goes beyond simply mentoring to include career-defining support, a reward structure, and metrics to gauge results. About five years ago, Oregon State University’s Research Office created the role of Faculty Lead for Innovation Excellence. This position – initiated as part of an NSF-funded project — encourages and supports faculty involvement in innovation and entrepreneurship through a large, robust peer-to-peer mentoring program.
We’ve secured Dr. Rich G. Carter, the Faculty Lead for Innovation Excellence and Professor of Chemistry at Oregon State, to lead this masterclass in creating a network of faculty advisors who have successfully commercialized their own research and then advise their colleagues who are new to the process.
Dr. Carter will describe how Oregon State University became a leader in faculty innovation & entrepreneurship (I&E), and how that focus led to promotion and tenure incentives, as well as the creation of the nationwide effort to adopt innovation-based promotion and tenure criteria on university campuses.
