RICHARDSON , Texas (Sept. 29, 2005) – Commercialization, that sometimes bewildering but nevertheless vital process of moving promising ideas from the laboratory to the marketplace, will be scrutinized at a conference next month at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) that will feature speakers from the nation’s top universities, as well as venture capitalists and industry research leaders.
The conference, titled “University-Sourced Commercialization – What Works?,” will be held Oct. 19-20 on the UTD campus in Richardson. The event will be co-sponsored by The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
The purpose of the conference is to “bring together leaders from the corporate and university communities for the purpose of discussing important issues related to university-sourced commercialization, with a strong emphasis on technology-transfer successes,” said Dr. Don Hicks, conference chair and a professor in UTD’s School of Social Sciences, one of three of the university’s schools involved in staging the event. The others are the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and the School of Management.
“This year marks the 25th anniversary of the Bayh-Dole Act, which the U.S. Congress passed to enable and encourage research universities to commercialize discoveries made in their laboratories,” Hicks said. “Now, after a quarter century, it is time to identify and evaluate the successes created by this legislation and look ahead to a new era of commercialization.”
The Bayh-Dole legislation, named after the United States senators who sponsored it, created the modern legal structure for university commercialization, licensing and patenting, according to Hicks.
The two-day event will be organized around a series of four panels. Participants on the panels will include officials from leading universities – including Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Southern California and The University of Texas System – as well as other key figures in the technology-transfer field from businesses, venture capital firms and government.
Opening remarks will be made by W. Clark McFadden, partner, Dewey-Ballantine, and member of the steering committee for Government -Industry Partnership for the Development of New Technologies of the National Academy of Sciences. Two keynote addresses are scheduled – one will be delivered by Dr. “Desh” Deshpande, chairman and co-founder of Sycamore Networks and founder of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, the other by Dr. Stan Williams, Senior Hewlett Packard Fellow and director of quantum science research at HP Labs.
The conference is open to members of the public. The cost to attend is $100 per person for those who register before Sept. 30 and $150 after that date. For additional information, visit the conference web site at http://www.ecs.utdallas.edu/usc/, or contact UTD’s Theresa Dolan at 972-883-4315 or theresa.dolan@utdallas.edu. Conference attendance will be limited to 250 people.
About UTD
The University of Texas at Dallas, located at the convergence of Richardson, Plano and Dallas in the heart of the complex of major multinational technology corporations known as the Telecom Corridor®, enrolls more than 14,500 students. The school’s freshman class traditionally stands at the forefront of Texas state universities in terms of average SAT scores. The university offers a broad assortment of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degree programs. For additional information about UTD, please visit the university’s website at www.utdallas.edu.