Inventor’s Guide to help technologists commercialize

The Johns Hopkins University (JHU) Inventor’s Guide offers 18 pages of content explaining such processes as technology transfer (defined as “the movement of knowledge and discoveries from the research setting to the public”), intellectual property, patents, conflicts of interest and more. It also specifies how exactly these processes work for JHU students and scholars, the latter of whom JHTV Executive Director Christy Wyskiel identified as the guide’s primary audience. 

“A lot of this is not specific to Johns Hopkins, but is specific to the world of university tech transfer,” she said. “I think a big part of this is broad accessibility within the 55,000-employee Johns Hopkins community, but also throughout Baltimore — UMB, the entire University System of Maryland, for example, or others. Is there a way that some of this legwork is done so that others can benefit from it? Absolutely.”

Wyskiel, a seasoned founder and entrepreneur who has been a senior advisor to JHU President Ronald Daniels and led JHTV since 2014, added that she and her colleagues drew from a mix of best practices, years of stakeholder feedback and other sources when developing the Inventor’s Guide.

“These topics have come up, over and over and over, to my attention, to the attention of others on my leadership team to the folks throughout JHTV to say, ‘Well, these continue to be nuts that are hard to crack,'” she said. “‘And is there a way we can better explain them?'”