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A hallmark of a successful technology transfer office is the ability to sustain a high level of productivity and customer satisfaction (we serve two sets of customers – the UVA community and the companies that license UVA technology). Such productivity and customer satisfaction are often reflected in the number of inventions we receive from UVA, the number of patent applications we file, and the number of deals we execute annually. We have shown steady increases in each of these categories over the past several years, but perhaps the most striking statistic is deal flow. Over the past five fiscal years, we have executed nearly 300 deals. In the 2007 fiscal year (July 2006 – June 2007), the Patent Foundation executed 58 deals and generated over $6 million in revenue – of which more than $3.3 million was provided to UVA and the faculty as incentive compensation. Please see our Statistics page for more information on 2007 fiscal year results. The Patent Foundation has generated over $75 million in licensing revenue since its formation in 1978. Of this total, more than $35 million has been distributed to UVA to support additional research and other scholarly activities, and $17 million has been distributed to UVA inventors as personal income. Since it takes on average of seven years for a new technology to lead to a product that reaches the marketplace, we are confident that our royalty-generating success will continue to flourish. In order to provide more transparency into what we do at the Patent Foundation, we have created an Operating Manual which describes all the steps that are involved in our process. It is a roadmap for how we evaluate, market and license inventions. For a quick overview of the Patent Foundation's processes, click on the bubble "Our Technology Transfer Flow Diagram" in the upper left corner of this page. We have also created a Faculty-Entrepreneur Guidebook to help explain the long-standing UVA policies and procedures as they are applied to the area of faculty entrepreneurship, with twin goals of facilitating the development of new technology companies while preserving the unique nature of the UVA academic research enterprise.
Our Technology Licensing Guidebook is a collaborative effort between the Patent Foundation and local law firm Williams Mullen to provide a basic overview of such licenses to those not previously involved in licensing - what issues each party considers important during license negotiations, how those issues are balanced, and how the agreed-upon balance is memorialized in a written contract.
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