David Allen: Integration, Growth Contribute to Tech Launch's Second Year of Success

David Allen: Integration, Growth Contribute to Tech Launch's Second Year of Success

By University Relations - Communications
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Tech Launch Arizona Vice President David Allen
Tech Launch Arizona Vice President David Allen

When it comes to setting goals and achieving them, the UA's Tech Launch Arizona has the formula down.

Tech Launch Arizona, or TLA, is the multi-pronged office that commercializes inventions developed from UA research. The organization recently announced that it had achieved all of its performance metrics during fiscal year 2015, the second full year of its operations.

Between July 1, 2014, and June 30, 2015, TLA achieved 213 invention disclosures, issued 35 patents and helped form 12 startup licensee companies. You can read more about some of TLA's successes in this UANews article.

These achievements, which represent increases over the previous year's performance and support Never Settle goals, also contributed to the UA's designation as an Innovation and Economic Prosperity University by the Association of Public Land-grant Universities.

Lo Que Pasa spoke with David Allen, vice president of TLA, to learn how the UA's technology-commercialization branch has achieved its success and what is in store for the coming year.

What factors contributed to TLA’s success during the previous fiscal year?

Over the past year, we have completed the integration and build-out of the TLA team. Today we're a single, integrated organization that brings together technology transfer and licensing, business development resources and tech parks to address the spectrum of needs and services along the invention to commercialization continuum. It's reassuring to see how a real awareness is developing throughout the UA community, not just that we're here. Every day, more people understand that we're here to help people take their research to the next level — to help them create that social and economic impact through their discoveries and inventive ideas. And the last piece is that we've been successful in reaching out, both inside and outside the UA, and making the connections across the community to build a successful innovation ecosystem. We couldn't do what we do without broad engagement and contribution across both the southern Arizona and alumni communities.

Explain the idea of an "innovation ecosystem" and how this concept can help the UA achieve its Never Settle goals.

An innovation ecosystem is a collectivity of people, companies, capital and capacities coming together to support the overall purpose, the various segments and the individual technologies as they begin to relate to the market. Our innovation ecosystem encompasses the students, faculty and staff of the UA, all the collective research taking place here, the people and business community of southern Arizona, and all of the UA connections worldwide. We're bringing all of those elements together to translate research into new technologies and new companies for the overall purpose of improving lives and creating jobs and wealth for our community. 

What's in store for TLA in the coming year?

This year we will continue to grow. There are so many people out there doing incredible research. we will dig farther to uncover the great inventions in the UA researcher community. In FY 2015, we received 213 invention disclosures. That should go up at least 10 percent. We're also going to see a similar percentage increase in the number of patents we file, and we have targeted helping to create 13 startup companies. We also will start more actively marketing our existing intellectual property, which will lead to more licenses for UA technologies. Also, we're really driving hard to create more synergies among the UA researcher and business communities to maximize that collaboration, to secure more non-dilutive funding, such as federal SBIR and STTR funds. Overall, we're hitting our stride, so you should just see things get more efficient as well.

To learn more about TLA, visit techlaunch.arizona.edu.

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