Microsoft's own tech transfer people

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'....Part of the Microsoft Research organisation is a technology transfer team. We have one that works globally and is run from the Redmond lab. We jokingly call them the spy network. They go round the rest of the company, and their role is to understand what the product divisions are doing and what their technical challenges are.... So the team knows what's going on in research and they know the product groups so they try and build relationships. Then technology transfer takes place in all sorts of ways. It works quite well. The other thing we do now is think about licensing technologies to Microsoft partners. The most recent example of that is a program called IP Ventures, where we contribute intellectual property and work with venture capitalists to create a company and take an idea to market.'