Pilot2Service TTO Engagement Strategy
Purpose
Use the Technology Transfer Office (TTO) effectively and recognise when outside support is needed alongside it.
Based on
the owner's published commercialisation guide (owner, 2025). Chapter "The Role of TTOs" (pp. 26-29).
- Hewitt-Dundas et al. (2024) — active TTO support in business relationships reduces a spin-out's risk of failure
- Chen et al. (2024) — the best TTOs act almost as co-founders, through trust-based networks
- Kirihata research — building the TTO's trust and long-term relationships strongly affects the outcome
Method
- Involve the TTO early: invention disclosure review, IP protection, shaping the commercialisation strategy.
- Find out what the TTO offers: funding connections (proof-of-concept funds, incubators), industry contacts, support for setting up the company, initial terms (equity split).
- Assess the TTO's limits: does it have experience specifically in your industry (e.g. medtech regulation, software business models)? If not, seek complementary support.
- Build a relationship of trust — the best TTOs help recruit an experienced CEO, bring in advisors, and navigate organisational bureaucracy.
- If the TTO process feels slow: communicate openly and don't assume ill intent — many organisations are developing "founder-friendly" terms and fast tracks.
- If an opt-out is available: weigh it carefully — those who bypass the TTO often end up needing support later anyway and may end up with worse deals on their own.
- Complement the TTO proactively: mentors, incubator programmes, specialist consultants in areas where the TTO lacks deep expertise.
Gotchas
- Step 3 (assess the TTO's limits, e.g. medtech regulation or software
business-model experience) needs to be checked per industry via
industry-specific-commercialisation-playbook, not assumed from general reputation — a TTO strong in biotech may have no relevant network for a software venture, and that gap only shows up if step 3 is actually done. - Step 5 ("if the process feels slow, don't assume ill intent") can be misapplied to a genuinely under-resourced or out-of-depth TTO — communicating openly is the right first move, but this skill doesn't tell you when slowness is really a limits problem (step 3) that needs complementary outside support (step 7) rather than more patience.
- Step 6 warns that opting out of the TTO often means needing support
later on worse terms, but weighing that trade-off requires reading your
institution's actual IP policy and benchmarks, which this skill doesn't
interpret for you (see
ip-disclosure-and-ownership-check) — deciding to opt out from this skill's general caution alone is the same ungrounded move it warns against. - This skill explicitly does not assess your own TTO's performance objectively (see "does NOT do") — concluding "our TTO is bad" from one slow interaction, instead of using the skill to structure what to ask and expect, overstates what the method supports.
- Step 2 surfaces the TTO's proposed equity split as one of the things it
offers, but judging whether that split is reasonable isn't this skill's
job — cross-check it against the benchmark ranges in
ip-disclosure-and-ownership-checkbefore treating an opening number as fixed.
What this skill does NOT do
- Does not assess your own TTO's performance objectively — it helps structure what to ask and expect.
- Does not replace direct contact with the TTO.
Continue from here
- Next in this pack:
../industry-specific-commercialisation-playbook/SKILL.md— Tailor the commercialisation strategy and expectations by industry: life sciences, deep tech, software, societal/humanities-based innovations. - Pack's shared guardrails:
../../CLAUDE.md - Overview of the full journey:
../commercialisation-journey-roadmap/SKILL.md
References
../../references/case-studies.md— 7 spin-out examples from different industries and regions../../references/terminology.md— the handbook's glossary../../references/sources.md— the handbook's own source references../../CLAUDE.md— the pack's shared guardrails