Virtual Bundling Agent (VBA): VBA was piloted to great success in 2005 and 2006 with the support of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.  Now entering a closing phase of its Kauffman pilot funding, in which it will bring commercial deals to completion and will document its entire model for expansion and further roll-out, VBA is already enhancing the regional infrastructure for innovation and is building a model for national impact.

The Problem it Seeks to Address: How can the nation’s innovation enterprise enable the commercialization of related technologies spread among multiple universities?  This question is increasingly important in light of the growing number of federally sponsored inter-university research projects and the resulting challenge of working with IP owned by multiple stakeholders.  In short, the ability of research institutions to transfer shared discoveries and technologies has simply not evolved at the pace of innovation.  Consequently, while research has become more collaborative and multi-institutional, technology transfer has not, and the IP from myriad shared research projects remains far from the marketplace – untapped and difficult to gather into compatible “bundles” which could speed commercialization on a broader scale. 

Virtual Bundling Agent: NT2 member institutions together designed VBA to address the above problem and its specific causes of

1. competition among researchers (the suppliers);
2. incompatible university processes (the pipeline);
3. competition among businesses (the demand); and
4. a general lack of inter-agency trust (the atmosphere). 

The objectives of VBA: The overall goal of VBA is to measurably increase successfully-transferred innovation coming from NT2 institutions.  Objectives of each program phase include:

1. overcoming competitive issues;
2. creating bundles of compatible IP from multiple NT2 sources;
3. facilitating the transfer of those bundles to the marketplace (including 41 bundles of over 100 technologies already created and now in discussions with the market); and
4. tracking, measuring, evaluating, and widely disseminating all aspects of its own methodology. 

The methods employed: The methods used to achieve the above objectives include:

• developing a baseline confidentiality and non-competition framework signed by all NT2 research institution to overcome competitive issues;
• convening expert panels to build industry-specific bundles of like or complementary technologies from the IP libraries of NT2’s institutions;
• widely disseminating information about the bundles in broad and targeted ways;
• using Larta Institute's role as a trusted intermediary to assist in the communication between interested industry partners and NT2 institutions and to help keep actual transfer negotiations on track per the protocols of the baseline agreements; and
• authoring and presenting a report detailing quantitative and qualitative data and analyses of the above methodologies.