Resources
Tennessee Technology Advancement Consortium
“The journey from identifying specific problems to envisioning, developing, and benchmarking an innovation that can be manufactured into a functional product is often long and unpredictable.” From Nature Magazine
This reality underscores one of the most persistent challenges in university technology transfer: the path from discovery to commercialization is rarely linear, and it requires far more than technical expertise. Researchers excel at generating insights, publishing findings, and proving concepts, but translating these into usable, investable products demands new skills, new partners, and entirely different frameworks for decision-making. Over the past two decades the rise of translational research, the process of turning fundamental scientific discoveries into practical applications to address real-world problems, highlights the broad need to bridge the gap between laboratory insights and usable solutions. Even when the academic research advances to the point of prototypes, products, and practices that can be adopted by industry, a strong need for structured support to cross the well-established Valley of Death remains.
Launch Tennessee and the Tennessee Technology Advancement Consortium provides a model for scaffolding academic founders as they launch technology startups. This approach supports founders from the earliest stages of exploration and preparation to start a company, the tactical activities for the launch, and running a company. This model seeks to strengthen the pipeline of university-originated technologies that are prepared to enter the market.
Founder Alignment Conversation User Guide
The Founder Alignment Conversation provides a structured, founder-first framework for engaging academic researchers in early conversations about whether and how their work should transition beyond the university.
Start here
Introduction
The purpose, facilitator role, guiding principles, and practical approach to founder alignment conversations.
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Conversation guide
Transition Pathway Conversation Guide
A founder-first conversation framework for considering whether and how academic research should transition beyond the university.
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Conversation arcs
Conversation Arc 1: Identity and Career Alignment
How entrepreneurship fits into the individual’s academic and professional trajectory.
Read OnlineConversation Arc 2: Risk, Control, and Sacrifice
Comfort with uncertainty, loss of control, collaboration, and long-term commitment.
Read OnlineConversation Arc 3: Motivation for Entrepreneurship
Whether the desire is to build a company or achieve impact through other means.
Read OnlineConversation Arc 4: Capacity and Commitment
Realistic assessment of time, attention, and desire for operational leadership.
Read OnlineConversation Arc 5: Technology in Context
What this technology transition requires and how those demands fit the individual’s alignment.
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Pathway decision
Pathway Decision
Synthesize the conversation into a working pathway decision, with a summary template for documenting next steps.
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Facilitator Field Screening Tools
Pre-Conversation Preparation (Facilitator)
Complete before the first meeting to calibrate your approach.
Read OnlinePre-Conversation Preparation (Academic)
Offer to academics before the first meeting to help them organize their thoughts.
Read OnlinePathway Decision Aid
Complete after the conversation to translate signals into a working pathway decision.
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Explore & Prepare
Foundational guides and worksheets for researchers, entrepreneurs, and institutional partners working through the early stages of technology transition. Each document offers a focused tool you can use independently or as part of a broader commercialization process.
The Bayh-Dole Act
A reference guide covering the legal obligations researchers must satisfy when commercializing technology developed with federal research funding.
Read OnlineDiscovery to Disclosure
A step-by-step action guide for preparing and submitting an invention disclosure to your institution's Technology Transfer Office.
Read OnlineTechnology Assessment Guide
A seven-question framework for evaluating whether research qualifies for IP protection, who holds ownership rights, and what protection mechanisms apply.
Read OnlineConflict of Interest
An inventory tool for academic founders to identify financial interests and external relationships subject to disclosure requirements across institutional, federal, and publication contexts.
Read OnlineCommunicating Science for Business
A structured exercise for translating technical research descriptions into value-focused language for customers, investors, and program managers.
Read OnlineCommercial Readiness
A worksheet for organizing founder thinking across four core commercialization questions before beginning the operational work of launching a company.
Read OnlineInnovation Transition Alignment
A personal reflection guide for researchers evaluating how commercialization and venture formation align with their professional goals, capacity, and career priorities.
Read OnlineBuilding Your Heilmeier Responses
Worksheet that walks researchers through the DARPA Heilmeier Catachism. This is a model to describe the value of a research program and includes structured prompts, strong vs. weak answer patterns, and reviewer expectations for each.
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Ready to Launch
Organizational checklists that cover the operational, financial, and strategic decisions teams face when standing up a new venture or transitioning a technology to market.
University Interface (IP & Institutional Alignment)
Start here! This guide for resolving IP ownership, executing a license agreement, and establishing the legal and institutional boundaries between the university and the spinout company before formation begins.
Read OnlineLegal Formation
A structured checklist covering the foundational decisions required to incorporate the company, issue founder equity, and establish a clean ownership structure before raising capital or hiring.
Read OnlineCompliance & Administrative Infrastructure
A task guide for establishing the operational and regulatory infrastructure a company needs to function legitimately, receive payments, and pursue federal R&D funding.
Read OnlineFounder & Team Formation
A framework for documenting founder roles, equity allocations, vesting terms, governance structure, and advisor agreements before the company moves into active operations.
Read OnlineStrategic Readiness
A preparation guide that ensures founders have articulated a problem statement, identified a first customer, and developed initial strategic positions before engaging with mentors and advisors.
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Up & Running
Resources for running an academic spinoff company. Files coming soon.
Communicating Science for Business
A worksheet for translating technical description into language that imparts customer value, moving the subject from the technology to the person using it.
Read OnlineTechnology Brief and Customer Discovery Plan
A living document for capturing your assumptions about the technology, its problems, users, buyers, and benefits, plus a customer discovery plan and tracker to turn those assumptions into evidence.
Read OnlineRFP Review Guidelines
How to read, assess, and qualify a government solicitation, from first-pass filters and evaluation criteria to compliance requirements and SBIR/BAA considerations.
Read OnlinePaid Pilots
Coming SoonTechnology and Strategic Partnerships
Coming SoonFinancial Models
Coming SoonProduct Development
Coming SoonBill of Materials (BOM)
Coming Soon
Spinout Scaffold
AI-Powered Academic Spinout Execution Assistant
Spinout Scaffold is a prototype web-based tool that guides academic researchers through a series of operational tasks for launching a university spinout company. In addition to these task checklists and tracking, the tool incudes a structured RAG-LLM (Retrieval-Augmented Generation Large Language Model) based on a knowledge base of 70 curated startup documents to enable natural language support for understanding and executing these tasks. A document generation tool was also included to provide a means to develop draft corporate materials. This proof of concept can be expanded to include additional tasking and a more comprehensive database of reference materials for the RAG LLM capabilities.
The current version provides:
- 66 tasks across 5 modules (Legal Formation, Compliance, University Interface, Founder Formation, Strategic Readiness)
- AI-powered task guidance - Auto-generated "Getting Started" overviews for each task
- Intelligent Q&A - Founders ask questions and the AI searches across 70 PDFs from sources like Cooley law firm, Fidelity, and university tech transfer offices
- Custom document generation - Creates founder agreements, 83(b) elections, advisor agreements, and other startup docs based on knowledge base examples
- Persistent conversation history - Chat interactions are saved per task for reference
- Progress tracking - Gamification to motivate task completion
The video below provides a brief demonstration of the Spinout Scaffold prototype tool.