Innovations Unleashed through Enterprise 2.0 technologies

The Harvard Alumni Association in partnership with Harvard's Office of Technology Development (OTD) and Harvard Business School held a seminar recently on efforts to engage Harvard alumni to facilitate efforts to bring Harvard innovations to market. The University generates 250 new inventions per year supported by a research budget of approximately $600 million. The OTD executes approximately 50 license agreements per year and generates approximately $24 million of royalties annually for the University. Isaac Kohlberg, Senior Associate Provost and Chief Technology Development Officer, has done an outstanding job expanding the efforts of OTD to capitalize on the Universities innovations and, in seeking engagement with Harvard's alumni network, has introduced a creative approach to facilitate the difficult task of translating a raw technology into a successful enterprise.

Successful engagement with Harvard's more than 300,000 strong alumni to facilitate this task will require careful leverage of many recent social networking and Enterprise 2.0 innovations however the technologies to accomplish this effort are now in place and the timing is excellent for the launch of this exciting initiative.