My project was part of the Scieneering Program at Virginia Tech.

The program took

place over summer 2012 and consisted of making an electronic portfolio, attending
weekly meetings, 40 hours per week internship/research, creating a short video,
creating a poster, and performing a presentation of our research. The electronic
portfolio was made up primarily by daily work notes. The weekly meetings were for
all of the Scieneers and SURFers. The meetings focused on providing information
relating on how to improve our summer internships/research as well as holding
presentations given by guest speakers on a variety of topics. The meeting also
focused on creating groups that would work together to make a video. The
internship/research for me was working at Virginia Tech Intellectual Properties. My
work at VTIP consisted of prior art research, market research, creating contact lists,
conducting an inventor interview, performing licensing evaluation, and performing
Chalk Talks (individual presentations to VTIP) for various technologies developed at
Virginia Tech. Each Scieneer was required to create a poster of their research, my
poster focused on an Abstract and four notable cases that I had worked on during
the internship. Because of the unique internship at VTIP, myself and three others
were asked to give a presentation at the . Altogether, I spent roughly 350 hours or
more completing the Scieneering project.

An Introduction to Tech Transfer: Assessment, Protection, and Licensing of

Inventions through VTIP

My research this summer was focused on an introduction to tech transfer. Tech

transfer consists of three main categories, an assessment of a technology, the
protection of said technology, and the licensing of said technology. One of the first
projects that I worked on at VTIP was a technology on fingerprint scanning. This
was a perfect introduction because the technology was fairly easy to comprehend
and the market is well documented. I assessed the technology by performing prior
art searches, creating a contact list, conducting an inventor interview, and using
market research databases to find additional companies and determine market
potential. The latest technology I worked on was for a novel sensory stimulation
device. This project was focused on the licensing section of tech transfer. In
addition, this technology was a more difficult project due to ambiguity in market
potential and its field of use. The market for the technology was relatively small and
poorly documented. I performed licensing evaluation by making a list of companies
that are involved with similar or competing technologies, providing relevant
information of the companies, calculating their profit margins, calculating a royalty
rate based off of those profit margins, and calculating the total sales figures. The
majority of the inventions I was involved with were associated with the Electronics,
Energy, and Optics. I also worked with the Center for Power Electronics Systems.