Good morning,
My name is Linden Rhoads, and I am testifying today from Seattle Washington. I’ve been asked
to participate because from 2008 to 2014, I served as the Vice Provost for Commercialization for
the University of Washington. During my tenure the university agreed to a substantial temporary
increase of the budget for tech transfer, which we used to implement an integrated slate ofprograms designed to radically increase licensing and spin-out activity, and we were successful.
So my experience is a reinforcing data point for anyone who posits that there is gold in theacademic research hills, and that we could as a nation be mining more of it. The University ofWashington has a massive research enterprise, conducting over $1.5B of mostly federally funded
research every year. Yet, as with most research universities, there had been little to show for it incommercialization output when I arrived; the ten year run rate for spin-outs from the university
was 8 per year, and many of these were companies destined to be small hobby businesses. In mylast year at UW we spun out 21 companies -- that put UW at third in the nation for academic
spin-outs -- with the majority of those companies being venture capital appropriate companies
that had the potential to scale, create jobs, and have real impact. I was not a career academicexecutive. The UW hired in me a serial technology entrepreneur two of whose ten start-ups had
been spin-outs from the university’s computer science and engineering department. I was hired tobe a change agent, and made a multitude of programmatic changes that drove the spectacularimprovement in results over the 6 years I ran the office. We brought in in-house patent agentswith specialization in both IT and life science who were available to confer free of charge withresearch faculty about IP in areas in which they were considering writing research grants,
seeking promising “IP white space.” We launched an entrepreneur-in-residence program thatprovided broad mentorship to entrepreneurial faculty and would-be entrepreneurial faculty, andintroduced potential CEOs with industry and highly technical and scientific subject matter
expertise to our world class researchers. We created advisory boards of industry experts whocould advise our life science faculty on regulatory issues, clinical trial design, and the rightapproach to the FDA. Because in many cases the only way our faculty/entrepreneur teams could
amass sufficient capital to spin-out a life science start-up was with an SBIR grant, we hired anSBIR grant writer to assist us in doing a better job of garnering that support. We awarded$1.25M annually in $50K “commercialization” grants to the most promising translational

projects, requiring that the funds be used not necessarily for science, but for some step thatwould reduce technical or market risk and thus increase the likelihood that the project couldattract ROI funding from for-profit investors. We launched the university’s first incubator, abuilding with wet lab space as well as office space for start-ups. We raised a $20M venture fund,The W Fund, that invested exclusively in spin-outs from Washington’s non-profit research
institutions. I still serve as the General Manager of The W Fund and we are making our lastinvestment, a follow-on investment in one of our 19 portfolio companies, this month. Expert
sector-specific mentorship, value-creating gap funding, and strong IP support created significant
new opportunities and economic success from UW’s already stellar research enterprise. Thislevel of support is necessary because university researchers balance commercialization efforts
with their academic teaching and research workload. The programs I’ve mentioned required
passion for seeing the research that had consumed millions in federal funding and the careers ofstar researchers actually get to a patient and improve their health. But these programs also
required funding. Very few tech transfer offices, especially those at public universities, haveadequate funding. UW had had one big tech transfer hit, The Hall patents, that provided a baselevel of funding to the tech transfer office. I convinced the university administration to invest
over $2M more per year while I was there to allow us to spend more on the programs I’ve
mentioned as well as bump up patent activities. It was a happy coincidence that my arrival
coincided with a moment when this public university was positioned to accede to my request.
My successor started when the Hall patents had just expired, and spent 5 years winding down
many of the programs that had yielded great results. Support of the innovation ecosystem is along-term play and while short-term gains can be achieved, game-changing potential is lost when
programs must be dismantled. This is why tech transfer administrators are wary of programs thatsuggest that minimal capital investments will have great results, or that significant capital
investments over only a few years will have sustained results. Too often government orfoundations offer universities a few hundred thousand dollars to a million dollars a year for one
to three years with the idea that somehow after the program funding ends, the program will be
self-sustaining. The continual pivoting and change is not helpful. What is needed is ideally aten-year commitment of the substantial funds major tech transfer offices need to provide
comprehensive innovation support including the funds to speculatively protect the intellectual
property generated by federally funded research, including filing international patents whereappropriate. Only a few elite private institutions can afford to do this adequately today. This is atleast a $3M price tag per $1B of federally funded research per year, on top of the funding suchoffices currently have available in their budget for base operations. Such funding would allow
universities to align their considerable tech transfer talent with entrepreneurs and investors inbridging the gap between promising discovery research and life-improving technologies andproducts. I’d also like to commend the iCorps HUBS. My colleagues in tech transfer continue tolaud these programs that train researchers to pursue customer directed discovery and to focus on
the end user, and that encourage well managed expert industry mentorship. I’d be happy toanswer any questions.