This December marks Ron Huss’s 20th anniversary working in the Office of Technology Management. Huss has been managing the office since 2000, and in 2008, he was promoted to Associate Vice President for Research and Technology Transfer, where he provides leadership of Penn State’s vast intellectual-property assets, which comprises thousands of patents, patent applications, copyrights, and other IP.
Huss earned his bachelor of arts degree in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Before his tenure at Penn State, Huss worked in grant management, and even worked on beer fermentation from a biochemistry standpoint.
Since Huss began working with university technology management, there has been a big shift in the perspective on …show more content…
RH: Faculty researchers are primarily focused on research and approach new technologies from that point of view. They self-select to be academics and/or researchers. They’re a group of people very interested in science, and usually not as much in business. They’re excellent at writing proposals, and that’s why they’re successful—they bring in money to support their projects and excel at attracting students, managing projects, and publishing results.
That’s a unique skill set, but to ask these researchers to have a separate skill set where they need to excel at managing a company and have all of the skills needed for that—that’s asking a lot. Some faculty have both sets of skills already, but we generally encourage faculty to focus on the technical side of things even as they move toward commercialization. We often encourage the researchers/inventors to become the CTO Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or Chief Science Officer (CSO) of the company they helped found, and we help them find a career-entrepreneur to run the company as CEO.
J: So there is a career development aspect to Invent Penn
Huss earned his bachelor of arts degree in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Before his tenure at Penn State, Huss worked in grant management, and even worked on beer fermentation from a biochemistry standpoint.
Since Huss began working with university technology management, there has been a big shift in the perspective on …show more content…
RH: Faculty researchers are primarily focused on research and approach new technologies from that point of view. They self-select to be academics and/or researchers. They’re a group of people very interested in science, and usually not as much in business. They’re excellent at writing proposals, and that’s why they’re successful—they bring in money to support their projects and excel at attracting students, managing projects, and publishing results.
That’s a unique skill set, but to ask these researchers to have a separate skill set where they need to excel at managing a company and have all of the skills needed for that—that’s asking a lot. Some faculty have both sets of skills already, but we generally encourage faculty to focus on the technical side of things even as they move toward commercialization. We often encourage the researchers/inventors to become the CTO Chief Technology Officer (CTO) or Chief Science Officer (CSO) of the company they helped found, and we help them find a career-entrepreneur to run the company as CEO.
J: So there is a career development aspect to Invent Penn