20-21 May 2010.
Entrepreneurship and the valorisation of knowledge have become important for all universities in Europe. They are now prominent elements of plans and activities in the domains of education, research and extension. While transferring research results to the public domain is longstanding, researchers and university managers must now seriously consider the promises of bringing their inventions and results to the market.
A major challenge in our knowledge based society is the continuous development of products based on new scientific achievements. Product development requires bridging the gap between organizations that do fundamental and applied research and those that develop and commercialize those products. This interplay between science and technology and its valorization and commercialization was the subject of a successful conference held in March 2010*. Key notes of this conference were technology transfer, IP-management, licensing, incubation, spin-off creation, public-private partnerships, techno-economic clustering at Wageningen University and Food Valley in the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe and North America.
We would now like to invite you to participate in the follow-up conference that zooms in on these issues and will show the various approaches to valorization in the field of Plant Sciences. Keynote speakers representing a range of stakeholders will present the views of Wageningen UR, in particular the Plant Sciences Group, the Dutch government and industry. Results of a just completed survey of public and private plant breeders’ evaluations of technology transfer and knowledge valorization will be presented along with a number of pertinent cases on tech transfer and valorization taken from the international arena. The conference will illustrate that technology transfer and knowledge valorization are topics with great impact for knowledge institutions and will remain high on the agenda for the coming years. Participants will gain a clearer understanding of the issues, options and consequences of entrepreneurship and knowledge valorisation.
* You can find all presentations of the conference “Technology Transfer at Wageningen UR and Elsewhere” held in Wageningen March 25-26, 2010 via :http://www.dafne-entrepreneurship.nl/Pages/TechTransferConferencepresentations.aspx
The conference is a cooperation of the Management Studies Group and the Plant Sciences Group at Wageningen University and Research Centre.
In particular it is an initiative of Bill Lesser (visiting professor from Cornell University) and organized in collaboration with Wim Hulsink and Hans Dons, (professors in Entrepreneurship at Wageningen University) and Ruud van den Bulk (Director Business Development of Plant Sciences Group).
The conference is facilitated by the ZHI Foundation (sponsor of the Rotating Chair International Entrepreneurship at Wageningen UR) and by DAFNE, the Centre of Entrepreneurship.
You can register for this conference by sending an email to tt.conference@wur.nl stating Conference Tech Transfer II, your name, title, position and affiliation (for on the badge). There is no entrance fee.