I license, therefore I am

Does the technology transfer profession exist? It seems an odd question to ask for a trade paper, but it was arguably an even more intriguing discussion to have surfaced at the annual meeting of non-profit professional association Autm earlier this month. There is a report on the conference in this month’s magazine, but let’s consider the idea in more depth here.
Even speaking to delegates on the floor who were not present during the panel discussion, explaining that there was even an idea that their job did not exist as a profession raised eyebrows. Surely, it would have to if thousands of people had just gathered to share best practices?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a profession as a “paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification”.
Technology transfer staff fulfil the first of these conditions easily. Of course, they are remunerated by their university just as other personnel are.
The job also requires training and a particular skillset, and there are various routes to becoming a staff member, ranging from internships for PhD candidates to making the switch from industry.
The third condition is a more difficult nut to crack. Formal qualifications exist, such as the registered technology transfer professional (RTTP) designation, but to obtain that certification you have to be in the job already – RTTP is not a prerequisite for joining an office.
Having a formal qualification – or at least one explicitly gained for the job in question – is however becoming a rarity in today’s economic reality that most people do not hold the same job their entire lives, so technology transfer is arguably on trend.
And things are murky across the venturing world – founders often become investors once they successfully exit their startup, having until that point experienced venture capital only from the other side of the table. Yet nobody would argue that investors do not form a profession.
Complicating matters is the fact that many technology transfer offices have become complex structures that can include everyone from a chief executive all the way to a communications manager and a legal team. Some even handle consultancy services on behalf of the university.
Henric Rhedin, president of Autm’s European counterpart ASTP-Proton, presented another key factor during the panel – he argued that the profession lacked recognition by the public and many politicians, who saw universities purely as education and research institutions. This may be true, but countless other professions and areas of seemingly well-known environments are also obscure. A patient may be aware of surgeons, anaesthesiologists and nurses in the operating theatre, for example, but how many would list the perfusionist, who is responsible for the heart-lung machine?
People may also not know what happens to a research project once it is concluded, but there is a notion that something happens and that it does not just disappear into a textbook. Tell someone that a professor has found a way to fight hepatitis B, for example, and that person will have an expectation that this knowledge will make its way into a pharmacy, even though that person’s understanding of how that will happen may be hazy.
Having the discussion around technology transfer as a profession is worthwhile not least because answers may be uncovered that can be used when talking to policymakers and university management. But there should not, beyond the intellectual merits of the debate, be any doubt in the heads of technology transfer staff that they are part of a profession.
It may be obscure, but it is incredibly valuable, and its loss would be noticed – just like the perfusionist’s. And that, perhaps, is the best argument in favour of the profession existing. Its disappearance would create a noticeable impact on a university’s mission of generating knowledge that actually leaves the lab.
It would also mean the demise of this publication – whose very existence should also serve as proof that the profession exists. We will leave it to the reader to decide which of these two consequences would be more upsetting, but let this editor confirm that there is a correct answer.