From March 28th to 30th, 2023, the FedTech team attended the Federal Lab Consortium (FLC) National Meeting in Cleveland, Ohio. FedTech Founder and Managing Partner, Ben Solomon, described the event as, “...the big group event where tech transfer professionals from all over government come together.”
During the conference, FedTech led a day-long training for over 70 attendees on the topic of "Advanced T2 for Senior Practitioners". In the soldout workshop, the team led participants through engaging inventors at the earliest stages of innovation and working with startups and early-stage ventures in order to better facilitate federal technology transfer.
More About the Workshop
The "Advanced T2 for Senior Practitioners" workshop was built around the common innovation frameworks FedTech practices every day through its programs and used an interactive approach to encourage small group brainstorming and collaboration throughout the day. The discussions and collaboration fostered an exciting discussion about strategies for technology commercialization through spinout companies.
The team leveraged FedTech's experience in venture creation across numerous federal labs to build out case studies of startup failures that the participants could learn from and inform how their labs engage startups. FedTech shared strategies for government professionals to use when engaging the venture ecosystem to take back to their respective federal labs.
“It was a special experience to be part of the big collaborative discussions on many initiatives across government agencies. I felt that the federal technology transfer is going through an inflection point to make a strong mark on our collective mission of maximizing the impact of federal technology transfer,” said Ian Ryu, Principal of FedTech’s Technology Partnerships team.
Recognition at FLC
One of the highlights included an awards ceremony showcasing the best of technology transfer from the last year, including a Technology Transfer Innovation award received by FedTech’s partners at the Department of Homeland Security Science & Technology Directorate (DHS S&T) for their work Facilitating the Swift Advancement of Technology Innovations for Homeland Security. The award celebrated the work of the Homeland Security Startup Studio, a long-standing partnership between FedTech and DHS S&T.
“It was incredible to see all of the awardees recognized and I was impressed by how many involved cross-agency collaborations. We were proud to see our partners at DHS S&T recognized for the work they have done to bring innovation and entrepreneurship into a complex organization with a broad mission set. We are excited to see what’s next for them as a forward-thinking agency partner and the connections to other labs and agencies that have similar opportunities.” said Robyn Brazzil, Partner at FedTech.
The rest of the conference consisted of team members meeting in person with a number of key stakeholders across the federal lab space and attending panels covering a range of relevant matters including DEI&A, university engagement, and different approaches to marketing the labs.
Looking Toward the Future
Ian Ryu commented on the changing landscape of federal tech transfer, “FLC 2023 Annual Conference was full of energy from brilliant T2 colleagues working on forging a new frontier of federal technology transfer.”
The FedTech team is excited to continue the great conversations from FLC — both in the "Advanced T2 for Senior Practitioners" workshop and on the floor — to foster more collaboration across the lab ecosystem.
“It's just been an amazing experience to get to see a lot of our current partners and meet some future partners,” said Ben Solomon.
Did you miss us at FLC? Reach out to us to chat at hello@fedtech.io.