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The UST Innovation and Technology Support Office (ITSO) was one of the selected mentors for the USAID STRIDE’s Knowledge and Technology Transfer Office (KTTO) development project. UST-ITSO Manager Assoc. Prof. Michael Jorge Peralta acted as one of the workshop’s mentors and facilitators. The project is under the Partnership for Growth with Equity, which aims to strengthen the Philippines’ science, technology, and innovation capacity to spur inclusive and resilient growth.  It intends to build a stronger innovation ecosystem that will primarily be driven by the government and its substantial investments in innovation.  

The objective of the KTTO program is to capacitate universities in technology transfer and commercialization through skills building of its ITSO personnel.  With the advent of the DOST-PCIEERD’s HEIRIT training program for Technology Business Incubators (TBIs), STRIDE has re-aligned its KTTO curriculum to be able to complement the training given to TBIs.  STRIDE, through the KTTO Development Program, aims to capacitate technology transfer offices in universities to better support their TBI counterparts through IP assistance and the like. The second workshop was held from September 23 to October 2, 2019 at the Makati Palace Hotel. 

  The second workshop was on the ‘Operationalize and Learn Module,’ where the participants write down and plan their tactics on making their ITSO-KTTO functional by identifying their university assets, crafting their message to their stakeholders, creating their metrics, and establishing network with industry.  The highlight of the workshop was a networking night, where industry companies came to talk to universities in the hope to forge collaborative projects with them.

Being one of the first batches of trained KTTOs, UST-ITSO was selected to mentor other ITSOs and guide them in organizing, setting-up, and establishing their functional KTTOs.  Essentially, ITSO can function as a KTTO because of its know-how in the field of protecting IP rights. Before a technology is transferred to industry, its IP should be protected in order to prevent copying and duplication so that the inventor will not lose his interest to create more.

One of the goals of the ITSO initiative is to assist faculty and students, and capacitate other ITSOs in transferring their research projects and developed technologies to industry for public good after IP protection.  Establishing an ITSO-KTTO is the first step in building an ecosystem of innovation. It is the gateway to industry collaboration.