A unifying week for Knowledge Transfer

ASTP's EU Policy Advisor, Alessandra Baccigotti reports back from a week of exciting events in the global KT calendar.

On 11^th and 12^th October, the first in-person ATTP Council Meeting since the Covid-19 outbreak took place in Geneva, hosted by CERN. It was a great opportunity to discuss the present and the future of the knowledge transfer profession and its acknowledgement at global level. There are already 700 knowledge transfer colleagues around the world who have received the designation of Registered Technology Transfer Professional, but we need more to contribute to achieve an impact from public research and ASTP, and the other ATTP Alliance members, will be more and more engaged and committed to advocating for the profession.

Special thanks to ATTP Chair Tim Boyle and to our new ATTP Manager, Florence Desportes, for organising the event, to our host, Markus Nordberg who led us to discover CERN and its history and to Ashwin Ravikumar who showed us how it is possible to do knowledge transfer in an open science-based organisation like CERN.

Then, on 12^th and 13^th October ASTP was directly involved in the 1^st Knowledge Transfer International Symposium, organised in collaboration with Reseau Curie, AUTM, Praxis Auril and WIPO. It was a 24-hour non-stop online event with a dense programme covering most relevant knowledge transfer related topics, ranging from practical skills, KT challenges, metrics to funding, human capital and ecosystem. Did you miss it? No worries because a recorded version of the webinars will be soon available through the ASTP website.

Finally, on 13th and 14th October Laura MacDonald and Alessandra Baccigotti represented ASTP at the International Knowledge and Technology Transfer Leadership Summit 2022 organised for the first time jointly by AUTM and WIPO and hosted at the WIPO Headquarters in Geneva. 38 leaders from 16 countries around the world convened to discuss two main topics: Increasing diversity across our innovation ecosystems and Models for government funding of KT/TT. Again, an amazing opportunity to share knowledge and experience at global level and to strengthen the position of ASTP in the international knowledge transfer arena. 

38 leaders from 16 countries around the world convened to discuss two main topics: Increasing diversity across our innovation ecosystems and Models for government funding of KT/TT. Again, an amazing opportunity to share knowledge and experience at global level and to strengthen the position of ASTP in the international knowledge transfer arena.

Special thanks to our hosts at WIPO Marco Aleman, Olga Spasic and all the team and to our AUTM colleague Stephen Susalka and his team.