Silvaggi leads UWMRF into the future

MSUN: What is Technology Transfer?

JS: I like to use the word commercialization… Technology Transfer is basically helping move exciting new ideas, innovations, inventions, and services out from the university where they’re created, and into the hands of a company to develop it to its final stage so it can be sold on the market.

So, whether it’s a small, medium, large, or new startup, there has to be a company that we hand it over to.

MSUN: When an innovation is developed on the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee campus, how does it become a candidate for commercialization?

JS:  We’ll ask the professor or the student early on if they are interested in forming a startup. It’s a minority because people are at the school to be professors or students. They don’t have the bandwidth or the knowledge to start a business. But if they want to, we support them 100 percent.

Tech Transfer has changed. It’s become increasingly difficult to attract a company (to purchase a new innovation). They have to want a product in that space, right now, and they aren’t developing it themselves…It’s a needle in a haystack to find a partner. So, startups have really become the way of the day.

You need that in-between entity to keep pushing it forward and finding funding for it. The industry has  Technology Readiness Level (guidelines). Companies want to buy innovations at (level) seven. In a university, you can get it to (level) three or four. If you’re lucky, the team is good, and they keep going and they can get it to (level) five or six. There’s this gap of ‘who is going to bring it to the level at which a company really wants to license it?’

We don’t generally sell in the university setting. It’s really rare to outright sell intellectual property and just hand it over. You usually have a license, which is the agreement that states the royalty and fees paid to access and utilize the patent.

Often what happens is we’ll start trying to license (an innovation) and if we don’t find a partner, then they (the innovation team) realize they might want to do this themselves.

MSUN: What are the goals of the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Research Foundation?

JS: We like to describe ourselves firstly as a concierge service. We are a service organization to begin with because we want to be here for those innovative people and we want to help retain and support them, whether it’s faculty, students, or staff.

When a new UWM hires come in, there’s a lot more interest in entrepreneurship. They want to make sure that we have a strong office to support them with their inventions and patents.

We like to be very responsive. I work with other tech transfer offices. Trying to get agreements signed between us is a slow process. It is not like that with us. We pride ourselves on being responsive and easy to work with.

Our strategic initiatives are fostering corporate partnered research, igniting startups, and leveraging our intellectual property expertise. It’s about the support and education of people that are working on innovation. We have programs that help serve that purpose.

We have a seed program, the Catalyst Grant, which has been hugely instrumental. We are so grateful to the Bradley Foundation. They’ve supported us for 17 years of Catalyst Grant gifts that we award to seed fund new ideas. Without those monies, innovators won’t get the data needed to then apply to the national programs and grants.

Over the years we have awarded $5.8 million in Catalyst Grants. Those projects have been well-picked because they brought in another $38.3 million. We are over a six-fold return on investment with the Catalyst Grant. Most of our startups have gotten a Catalyst Grant at some point.

We now have a Bridge Grant. This is a great support from Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). They gave us funds and we had to match them and then we can give out small awards to our startups as well.

These grants keep the ball rolling and get that next thing done to attract investors.

MSUN: It appears there is a lot of collaboration between Tech Transfer programs at Milwaukee-area schools. Is that unique to this market, or is that how most cities work?

JS: I think it is unique. Early on, we started the Milwaukee Regional Tech Transfer group when Laura Savitski was at Versiti. We were getting together monthly and sharing best practices… the whole Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) is so forthcoming, transparent, and happy (to help). It’s a really supportive industry.

We did give a panel once at our annual AUTM meeting. We talked about our Milwaukee offices working together in the region and some people were like, ‘seriously?’ Especially in Europe, they said ‘we’re right in the same city and we never talk.’ I’m hoping others have gotten better at it now, but we were definitely an early-stage great network.

Notable area members of the group include Daniel Sem of Concordia University, Kalpa Vithalani of Marquette University and Kevin Boggs of Medical College of Wisconsin.

MSUN: How will advances in AI technologies shape the future of UWMRF?

JS: We’ve had AI and machine learning involved in many of our disclosures for years, so we’ve been in that game for quite some time, especially with inventions in the Computer Science and Engineering Departments…It has always been a part of our portfolio of expertise with certain faculty. We’ve always dealt with it; it’s just getting more important now that we’ve got the Connected Systems Institute and the Data Science Institute focused on it.

The university is no stranger to AI, and it will be a huge focus at UWM because we are an institution located amidst big companies, and we want to work with them, and AI is what companies want to work on. We will continue to make those connections and make sure that companies know that we have the expertise to work on it.

How can the Milwaukee business community support UWMRF?

JS: Through strategic partnerships.

We get donations and these gifts, but we don’t get to keep that money. We’re just passing it on. Some of our programs require matching funds and we cannot run them without gifts.

If companies need help in a certain area, and they don’t have a lot of research going on internally, they can work with us. For example, GE Healthcare sponsored our Catalyst Grant program for several years looking for help with imagining technologies. There was then a call for proposals and faculty submitted proposals to work on that problem. GE Medical then got to help select which proposals they thought were fitting for them to give the gift of the research.

Companies don’t get an automatic license, but they get to access and learn about early-stage research and see the talent and meet with the teams. We really want to do more of that.

If a company wants to direct the research, then it can do sponsored research, which means the company creates the research plan with the faculty member… and then they pay for the work to be done. The company then gets automatic rights to license it. We make this very easy through the program Panther Partnering.

It’s a really straightforward and transparent agreement… Sometimes companies get nervous and wonder ‘if this goes well, you guys are going to charge us a trillion dollars, right?’ That’s just not reality, I think worry about that because they haven’t worked with universities very much. So, we’re trying to dispel any concerns.

If a company does a sponsored research project and it knows there may be patents or intellectual property created, we can negotiate the costs upfront- no six months of redlining agreements back and forth with the company.  We’re just trying to get over the red tape and focus on the research and if it becomes a home run, then we can capture the home run.

To learn more about how your business can form a strategic partnership with University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, click here.