Cleveland Clinic Innovations – Creating A Global Innovation Engine

Article preview from IN VIVO - July, 2012

 

At a time when venture capital dollars are scarce and US-based innovation is threatened, Cleveland Clinic Innovations, with its novel GCIC cardiovascular project, is bringing critical mass and a new direction to an inherently unwieldy process.

 

 Cleveland Clinic Innovations – Creating A Global Innovation Engine

Article preview from IN VIVO - July, 2012

At a recent medical device conference, a prominent physician from a large academic medical center called tech transfer, as it’s traditionally practiced at most academic centers “an arcane process that takes forever and generates very little.” Indeed, he went on, too often tech transfer programs are “a major obstacle to good ideas.” Most tech transfer executives are “way overworked and way underpaid with too much on their plates.” Worse, he went on, doctors today frequently grow “paranoid and become unwilling to share their ideas” with their tech transfer offices. “I’m willing to bet that there are a lot of good ideas just lying around,” he concluded, because of the inherent difficulties and frustrations physicians face in working with tech transfer offices.

He’s far from alone. All over the country, physician/inventors bemoan the state of tech transfer, charging that offices designed largely for the purpose of bringing forward great ideas from the clinic ironically too often do just the opposite – either discouraging disclosure altogether or leading doctors to find some way to work around if not avoid entirely tech transfer offices in trying to develop new technology.

To some degree, the problems with tech transfer may be due to the very different cultures of academia and entrepreneurship, though as the recent debates about conflict of interest suggest, the days are long gone when physicians felt uncomfortable being part of for-profit company creation.

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