David Allen has spent his life working in technology development and commercialization at five US universities, in a career that saw him supervising over 600 exclusive licenses, enabling over 175 start-ups, managing nearly 225 POC projects and successfully negotiating two major ($40M+) royalty monetizations.He's spent almost 30 years in technology transfer and knows his stuff on what makes a university tech transfer office (TTO) successful. In this episode we talk about what it takes to build and run successful TTOs, the importance of engaging the local business, entrepreneurial and investment community, proof-of-concept funding, and how to make the TTO your friend in a license negotiation. It's a high-level technical conversation but useful for any entrepreneur, grad-student or researcher that's looking to get into the mind of the technology transfer organization on campus. 

See his TED talk entitled The Potential of Technology Transfer and find him on LinkedIn.  

More about David

Early in his career he earned a national reputation as a researcher, consultant, and manager in the field of technology business incubators. Later in his career he gained a national reputation for turning around underperforming university technology transfer operations, and for creating and operating university proof of concept programs. Over his career he developed a knack for identifying the asset potential in research derived inventions and how to move the inventions into the market through intellectual property strategy and early-stage technology development. He spent decades building and using innovation and commercialization networks to augment technology transfer operations. He retired from the University of Arizona (UA) April 2018 after 5.5 years as Vice President of Tech Launch Arizona (TLA).

Before coming to the UA, Dave was the University of Colorado System (CU) Associate Vice President for Technology Transfer from February 2002 to August 2012. Prior to CU he served as the Associate Vice President for Technology Partnerships at the Ohio State University in Columbus. Before coming to Ohio State in 1997, he was Associate Vice President for Technology and Economic Development, and Director of the Edison Biotechnology Institute, at Ohio University in Athens. 

Prior to his tech transfer career, he was a professor at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, where he taught graduate and undergraduate statistics, management, and entrepreneurship classes. During the decade at Penn State, he was also a consultant to a regional seed venture capital firm and the principal in a technology enterprise consulting firm. David earned a doctorate in 1980 from Indiana University, Bloomington. His Ph.D. chairperson and mentor was the late Elinor Ostrom, a co-recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics.

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