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The Office of Technology Transfer, or OTT, is the unit charged with managing the University of Arizona's intellectual property assets and facilitating transactions based on those assets. OTT carries out its mission within an educational, entrepreneurial, institutional, and legal environment.
OTT is a service office within the University and seeks an appropriate balance between intellectual property management and UA's greater educational mission, with deference to the latter when compatible with applicable policies. Compatibility with the educational environment means that OTT views technology transfer as a form of teaching, with the subject matter being commercializable innovations and the audience being other organizations, usually companies, that wish to absorb the material and put it into practice.
Cognizance of its educational environment also means that OTT does not intervene if a professor elects to publish and, in effect, donate to the public, an otherwise patentable and licensable invention, nor does OTT enter into agreements that curtail a faculty member's future line of research or delay a graduate student's thesis.
An OTT is called for by the Arizona Board of Regents and established by the University of Arizona, i.e. by the educational institution itself. ABOR and the University administration believe that, in most cases, UA intellectual property can be protected and commercialized with no fundamental conflict with the institution's broader educational mission. OTT strives to accomplish that goal with the involvement of the academic units and individual researchers, and in partnership with related service and administrative units.
Heads of academic research groups act as entrepreneurs in many ways, and OTT extends that activity to the institutional level and into direct transactions with for-profit companies, some of which might be faculty-founded start-ups. Acting as an entrepreneurial agent for the University, OTT scans faculty innovations for those likely to be profitably commercialized, invests in intellectual property protection for the most promising innovations, seeks customers in the form of licensees, and executes business deals with those companies.
Our legal environment is set mainly by federal statutes that give rise to intellectual property protection and the common law of contracts. ABOR, and the University of Arizona governance structure, including the Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, set the policies under which we operate.
