If you are ready to take the next step in your career, I want to share with you opportunities to use your technology transfer experience to expand and grow the University of Virginia’s commercialization efforts.
U.Va. Innovation is preparing to increase its research commercialization capabilities and has two senior licensing manager positions – one to manage the life sciences and the other to oversee the physical sciences portfolios.
To support this growth, U.Va. Innovation has retained the Vortechs Group to hire these two exceptional professionals to:
• Lead commercialization efforts of research developed at the University within the life sciences or physical sciences areas.
• Implement programs that make U.Va. Innovation an optimal place for collaboration among researchers and industry.
• Manage the flow of intellectual property developed by U.VA’s team of researchers.
• Work independently with a focus on licensing and start-ups with the support of the technology transfer office and the mission to expand licensing efforts.
The University of Virginia is located in Charlottesville, a vibrant community about two hours from Washington DC, with abundant cultural and social opportunities.
http://www.aaas.org/news/prescription-tech-transfer-focus-less-patents-more-partnerships
http://www.visitcharlottesville.org/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/26/travel/26hours.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
I have leadership experience in strategic planning, marketing, and business developments for a number of technology companies, both start-ups and established enterprises.
In my consulting practice I provide strategic marketing, product management, and business development covering areas as diverse as business analytics, data mining, visualization, numerical modeling, technical data analysis, high-performance computing / GPU computing, enterprise content management, medical records, and medical devices.
In several of my full-time (non-consulting) positions, I was working within startup environments, establishing procedures and organizations for commercializing new technologies developed under government research grants.
As Vice President, Marketing & Business Development at Tech-X Corporation, I incubated and grew a commercial sales organization to productize the results of research projects developed under the Small Business Innovation Research program within the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and NASA. This mainly consisted of me developing business plans to launch these technologies into commercial markets such as semiconductor fabrication and aerospace. Tech-X produces electromagnetic simulation software, developed in large part using open source technologies, running on large Linux clusters. The flagship product, VSim, addresses modeling needs for research laboratories within the US Department of Energy. A large part of my responsibility was to develop marketing plans to introduce applications of these technologies into new commercial markets such as semiconductor manufacturing and aerospace, which I did successfully. I introduced commercial marketing and sales methodologies. The organization I directed was responsible for packaging, supporting, promoting, and selling these technologies as software products and services. I developed market assessments, mapping the competitive landscape, researched conferences, trade associations, and other forums for promoting these products, and identified other companies, products, and technologies for synergistic partnering relationships. In the course of my tenure I also negotiated with technology transfer offices in the University of California and the University of Colorado systems, as well as creating end-user software license agreements. I also handled patent, trademark, and copyright filings. I was involved in recruiting resellers to address the Asian market as well as establishing two subsidiary offices in Europe. I also contributed on an individual basis by producing marketing collateral, selecting and staffing technical conferences, and acting in a sales capacity for software products and associated services.
In this role, I was a member of the management team, determining and executing company strategy. With my organizational experience, honed in managing and contributing within various functional areas, I have a good understanding of how the functional areas of a business need to work together to achieve corporate goals. As Director, Worldwide Marketing at Visual Numerics, I have experience in strategic planning and in compiling corporate operating plans for a $15M software company.
At NSA Geotechnical Services, I was responsible for marketing and business development activities. The technology, near-surface geotechnical surveys using microseismic methods, was developed under the Advanced Technology Program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. I was also the program manager for this grant. The main customers were various state and local transportation and utility departments, as well as contractors to those organizations.
Also at Visual Numerics, I did ongoing identification of market opportunities, competitive analysis, lifecycle management of products, requirements gathering, oversight of product development processes, business case development and P/L management. Specifically, as the product manager for the IMSL product line, I represented the product to our sales force, partners, and customers. The IMSL product family consists of numerical and statistical libraries for technical professionals. One of my accomplishments was to define a strategy for the growing use of complex numerical analysis in financial engineering. This effort resulted in doubling the revenue for the IMSL C Numerical Library from the finance sector. Overall, the result of my efforts was to increase worldwide revenue for the IMSL product family by 20%.
Also at Visual Numerics, I managed our board of external technology advisors, who provided insights on emerging technologies as well as contributing software features and solutions into our commercial products.
Throughout my career I have excelled at applying technology to solving problems. My ability to explain these solutions, either one-on-one in my role in sales and professional services, or one-to-many in my role in marketing, has made me effective in customer-facing situations. I have been responsible for communicating with customers and prospects, internal sales people, international subsidiaries, as well as outside sales agents, distributors and partners. As a strategic thinker, I can identify market trends and grasp new technologies to formulate a go-forward strategy. Further, I am detail-oriented and able to develop a tactical plan to implement the new strategy.
I am very interested in the opportunity presented in your position posting. I look forward to speaking with you regarding my qualifications. I can be reached by telephone at 303-641-3645 and via electronic mail at edkase@yahoo.com. Thank you for your time and consideration.