While Bayh-Dole and Stanford v. Roche have taken up a lot of space on these pages recently, they are not the only things going around here by any means.
One area of our work has been to gain a better understanding of how the internet is creating research-engaged community. We have experimented with Pearltrees, for instance, to better visualize web resources. I am slowly converting over my bookmarks for 200 university tech transfer offices, staff listings, and IP policies to a Pearltree approach. Zotero is another resource along these lines that allows the sharing (and annotation) of web resources. We have explored Second Life for real-time virtual collaboration, as well as Skype video calls, which don’t require so much in the way of avatar development.
We have been working on how to better engage community with research, and one approach is to transform research web sites into visual blogs. Open 3d Printing provides a working example. A picture and short note, two or more times a week, showing what the lab is doing, what it is finding, problems it has, what others are doing of interest, and where it sees things going. This sort of stuff often does not come out in formal publications, but does provide a way for others to find the lab, and get a sense of what is happening in the lab in the here and now.
Being found, and found in a useful way, is a really important concept for the web. Yes, there is advertising push, and that has its place. But when folks find you doing what you do, there’s something much more stable in the relationship from the get-go. It’s rather the option to live above ground, on the land, rather than in dark internet tunnels, and rather than on a balloon carrying fireworks.
We can put up a site, but how does anyone know to visit it? Early on, perhaps it doesn’t matter so much–it’s good to work out the bugs without a big audience. As things develop, however, one learns how to be visible, and learns to see what the internet has to offer. In particular, one learns how to host visitors at a site and take an interest in what they may be interested in–whether it is at your site, theirs, or somewhere else. We think there’s a big difference between a static web site that lists a lab’s areas of interest, perhaps with a picture a year or two old, and one that is updated regularly, tracking what the lab is doing.
A variety of strategies are available to become more visible on the web. Register the site with major search engines. Add key words. Establish incoming links from other sites. Add a link in your email signature line and in comments on other web sites. We have used a number of techniques beyond basic strategies such as these. For instance, we use distinctive words and names for things. This lets us track dissemination on the web via searches. Thus, “Vitraglyphic” for a new process for 3d printing powdered glass. Or “Clonedel” for a new design (and fabrication technique) for a DIY 3d printer. We have written our own press releases, and we have worked with industry blogs on the web to give them a heads up about announcements we are making so they can get the word out to their followers if they find our work interesting.
We also have added Google Analytics and WordPress Jetpack to research blogs to try to understand the effect of various posts on the web environment. The goal is not to increase traffic or to bother folks who are visiting, but rather to see better who is referring folks to a site, and what discussions and directions they have going at theirs. It is a way to see on the web. We find that there are folks out there who refer to our posts and appreciate acknowledgement back for their work. Becoming involved in such interactions is one of the ways that one engages others, shows hospitality and reciprocity, and develops a sense of what is going on. We find the track back information in Jetpack particularly helpful in learning what else is going on on the web in areas of interest. Often, our interest is extended by these interactions, and we consider stuff we wouldn’t otherwise have been aware of.
Of course, it helps to be active on LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora, and other such sites. paper.li is an interesting way to aggregate content from Twitter feeds. A number of Twitter users post a link and a comment. Paper.li allows one to search for key words or monitor hashtags, and assembles the results each day in a newspaper layout, following the links out to their web content, and then presenting that as a thumbnail with a link out to read the full posting. This kind of view of things evidences something of the activity out there–what is getting attention, where the tone of discussion is going, more so than only providing new “information”. If you create a paper.li on your own tech transfer office, and it doesn’t come up with much, that should say something right there. More so, if research lab work that you are seeking to promote also doesn’t come up readily. In a way, paper.li is a viewing device, how to open one’s eyes, “in the web” as it were.
We also have played around with WP Robot, an autoposting agent that allows one to create an auto news site on topics of interest, set up as a WordPress blog. WP Robot allows one to configure for a wide range of content streams. With WP Robot, one can, for instance, add a news feature to a web site and have continuously updated content–which can get one to visit one’s own website more often, just to see what’s up!
One program that we are looking at now is from Optify, a Seattle startup [now gone, sigh]. Optify provides a way to instrument the back end of web sites to better understand how they are being used. They prepare reports like this one, which shows percentage of click throughs for a sample of sites based on their position on the first two pages of a Google search result. Their own marketing is focused on competitive lead development, but I’m thinking there are some great applications for university research enterprise. The Optify folks set us up with a demo version so we could see how the software worked. Once installed, every day Optify sends us an email with a discussion of what happened on instrumented web sites in the past 24 hours–visitors (from where), page views, source of the visit (direct, search, referral), and the search terms people are using to find us. We are finding Optify really helpful in showing us how people are finding our sites, and in doing so putting our work in a broader context of web information flow. In a very real sense, it is tools like Optify that enable publication, not in the formal sense of print on the paper (or web site) of an archival journal, but in the activity of getting ideas and information out to an engaged public.
One might think, for technology transfer at its most broad and authentic, an engaged public is the vital condition. Not patents with monopoly positions to attract frumious investors, not announcements of how much more research money was brought in this year over last, not even workshops on entrepreneurship. All these things–even Bandersnatching–are of course available and have their place. But an engaged public is the best thing by far. A tool like Optify starts that interaction by first engaging researchers and enterprise development folks in the web-based social world. As they are able to see through the web, they are better able to engage folks that find them in the web registers, setting up opportunities for collaboration, competition, and innovation.
I wonder how much more effective a “tech available for licensing” list might be if it linked each posting back to a working research lab, added a WP Robot to track news related to the opportunity at the lab site, and included site instrumentation that allowed investigators and managers to see activity and interest through the announcement. It would be something of a change in design philosophy–beacon rather than hook. That in itself might be a valuable innovation in research tech marketing.