The new Office of Community Technology Transfer at Lorain County Community College helps inventors turn their ideas into new businesses for Northeast Ohio.
Dr. Sundara Manickam helps Clarice Kellogg with her oxygen tubes while treating patients at Mercy Regional Medical Center in Lorain. Manickam hopes to turn his idea for reducing the amount of oxygen hospitals need into a job-creating business. He's getting help from the new Office of Community Technology Transfer at Lorain County Community College. LORAIN, Ohio -- Nearly two years ago, Dr. Sundara Manickam came up with an idea that could help every hospital in the country cut its need for oxygen in half.
The device he envisioned would save medical centers around the world tens of thousands of dollars every year. On top of that, the patients who used it would be more comfortable.
There was just one problem.
Manickam doesn't work for a university or large research hospital that has its own office of technology transfer. Those offices help their employees jump the hurdles every inventor faces: creating a mock-up of the idea, testing it, getting FDA approval, finding funders, filing for a patent, starting a company and selling the products it makes to customers.
Doctors and researchers at institutions that have tech transfer offices have created dozens of businesses and hundreds of jobs over the years in Northeast Ohio alone.
Now Manickam can join them.
His help will come from the just-opened Office of Community Technology Transfer, or OCTT, at Lorain County Community College.
The goal of the OCTT is to help community inventors who don't have tech transfer offices at their disposal turn their ideas into products.
"But it's not for every kind of invention," says OCTT Director Russ Donda. "There's a plethora of inventions which involve things like games and toys and things for pets.
"The technologies that we're interested in are those that are going to be beneficial to people, either through medicine or green environmental technologies or improved communication technologies.
"Those things are of interest to investors."
The process is simple. Inventors with ideas go to the OCTT website, read the page and a half of policy, confidentiality and other agreements and fill out the invention disclosure form.
Donda will review that form and, within 10 days or so, let you know whether he thinks your idea is viable and his office has an interest in pursuing it.
After that, he'll conduct a patent search to make sure no one else has a lock on it.
Then, with your agreement, he'll hire a lawyer - at OCTT's expense - and file a provisional patent application.
OCTT will then help you form your own company or license your product to an existing one.
If you choose to create your own company, OCTT will help you find funding, hire a manager and take care of smaller needs, things like logo and website design.
In exchange, inventors agree to give the nonprofit OCTT 2 percent of royalties or about 5 percent equity in their companies.
"Our process is nearly identical to what the research institutions do, only we're doing it for the community," Donda say. "And the license agreement has been considerably streamlined compared to what's offered from a typical tech transfer office."
In promoting the idea, Donda mentions data from the Kauffman Foundation that says young firms, those 1 to 5 years old, account for about two-thirds of the job creation in the United States. And of the 12 million jobs created in 2007, young firms were responsible for nearly 8 million.
The goal of OCTT, he says, is to generate more of those jobs for Northeast Ohio.
"Over a period of five years, you could be talking hundreds of jobs," Donda says.
"And it isn't just jobs.
"With start-ups you have a creation of wealth. Either the company is acquired or there's an initial public (stock) offering. When that happens, the founders of those companies -- people in the community -- make money. And they get to take that money and start the process all over again."
Without the OCTT, inventors have tackled the difficult process of turning concept to company on their own, often taking years longer than they might otherwise have. Many give up.
Manickam, a hospitalist who practices at several medical institutions in Northeast Ohio, is one of them.
"You come up with so many ideas when you walk through the hospital," he says. "There are so many ideas you have not acted upon. Then it's a year or two later and someone else has come up with it."
With OCTT, that's no longer the case.
"It makes it much easier to work on the idea and get something concrete out if it," Manickam says, mentioning Donda in particular.
"Without him, I would say 'yes, it would be difficult to bring these kinds of things into play.' "
Donda brings years of experience with him.
Since 2010, he's been the entrepreneur in residence at GLIDE, the Great Lakes Innovation and Development Enterprise on the Lorain County Community College Campus. And he's the founding CEO of ViewRay, a Northeast Ohio company that developed a new radiation method for cancer patients and that began over coffee at Starbucks.
Donda hopes that experience will help him expand the community tech transfer idea beyond Northeast Ohio.
"I think this has national potential," he says.
"I would love to see this country utilize its creative spirit and turn that into as much beneficial innovation for the world as possible."