Wellspring Blog

Last week, the Wellspring team joined a diverse mix of hundreds of knowledge exchange professionals at KEUK 2026 in Newport. After all was said and done, we came away with plenty to noodle over.

People like to romanticize gamblers. They fantasize of the moment they push all their chips to the middle of the table on a wild bluff. But great gamblers don’t really gamble. They are math wizards that are capable of instantly computing their odds of success in any situation and act accordingly. Great innovators, too, aren’t the ones with the biggest cojones, willing to push in all of their reso…

Ideas get generated. Patents get filed. Research gets published. But somewhere between a promising concept and real commercial impact, momentum stalls. Not because people aren’t working hard, but because the ones responsible for different parts of the journey rarely share the same room, the same language, the same strategic conversation, or a clear-eyed view of what AI actually can do for them. L…

Monitoring TTO metrics is like a check-up with a doctor. When a physician measures your vitals, they’re not capturing a complete picture of your health. They’re checking a small set of high-signal indicators that provide a reliable snapshot of how your body is currently functioning. Weight, blood pressure, heart rate, and cholesterol can be fairly benign on their own. But when considered together…

Take the quiz to explore the core elements that define your enterprise’s innovation culture, uncover the components that set your approach apart, and get matched with an innovation game changer who would thrive in your unique culture of innovation.

Information without structure is a hurricane. It is random debris flying about, power lines down — there goes a cow flying by — total chaos. If the data, analysis, and feedback surrounding your innovation strategy is whirling around in turbulent circles, progress, let alone success, is extremely challenging. For today's innovation managers, organized, accessible, and accurate reporting is what ca…

In the parlance of our times, “Blockbuster is tired; Netflix is wired.” In planning your enterprise’s next three to five years and beyond, you want to be Netflix in this analogy. True, Blockbuster had its time as king of the hill — until they weren’t and eventually disappeared from existence (also see Sears, Kmart, and Toys R Us). The vast potential of artificial intelligence could make Blockbust…

One-size-fits-all is great in concept. Do you like that shirt/jacket/hat? You’re in luck, we always have your size. The underlying problem is it will probably fit like king-size sheets on a twin mattress. Similarly, when enterprises endeavor to innovate, balancing resources across cascading departments and dependencies requires oversight that feels more tailored than one-size-fits-all.

Don’t place the cart before the horse. It's one of those hokey old-timey sayings that feels like it has no place in the age of LLMs and robo-dog parkour . It’s actually quite apt considering the devotion many companies continue to carry for innovation systems that have been proven to stymie revenue growth.

It’s easy to take a look in front of you and see what you see without considering ALL the underlying impacts of anything ahead. Like the infamous glacier metaphor, there’s more to any challenge ahead than meets the eye.

Technology transfer offices aren’t asking whether modernization is necessary anymore.

At the heart of every great innovation lies a hypothesis: a carefully chosen statement about how change will create value. The hypothesis expresses why you believe your innovation, or adjustment to a product or service, will make a measurable difference. It’s the driving idea that leads to testing, validation, and, ideally, results. But not all hypotheses are created equal.

Most enterprises have no shortage of innovation activity. The real challenge is ensuring it adds up to meaningful growth.

Meetings are critical to the Stage-Gate ® process. They enable stakeholders to pause throughout development and make informed investment decisions. Without these meetings, innovation devolves into an expensive, unmonitored activity where everyone simply hopes for the best outcome.

The days of closed-door invention are long gone. The most innovative companies actively scout for new technologies and partners. But how do you coordinate technology partners globally? How do you keep track of technologies in the pipeline? How do you integrate internal needs and external opportunities? Tech Scouting is a complex business. And like other parts of the company, tech scouting teams d…

Reading time: 3 minutes All relevant portfolio data must be in one easy-to-access platform, which is non-negotiable. It’s impossible to make necessary portfolio adjustments when information is scattered across silos. Like a financial portfolio, a product portfolio is a series of investments. You compare risks against rewards and push resources toward products that yield the highest market potenti…

Join our host John Mooney as he walks you through Evolve, Wellspring's next gen tech transfer and IP management platform. Evolve is a powerful, flexible, and intuitive software that simplifies workflows, supports your team’s day-to-day needs, and scales with your office’s growth. It’s designed to deliver measurable impact, from research to commercialization. Watch the Webinar and discover how you…

The AUTM Annual Meeting 2025 proved to be an insightful and rewarding experience, filled with valuable sessions, engaging client interactions, and a strong sense of community that left us with fresh perspectives and new ideas. As you might expect, AI was one of the standout topics. Presentations by experts from industry, legal firms and universities discussed a plethora of AI use cases and also e…

Innovation creates value from novelty, but it can manifest in many different forms. The definition of “innovation” varies from sector to sector, industry to industry, organization to organization, and even person to person. The types of innovation that matter to you may be completely different than those that matter to another innovation team. But being familiar with a broad range of innovation t…