The Talent Gap in University Venture: What Technology Transfer Offices Are Getting Wrong
The technology transfer office (TTO) roles have no formal training pipeline. That single fact shapes every talent challenge downstream.
The founding team problem in university venture is well documented. On one side, researchers often lack commercial experience. On the other hand, business operators often lack scientific credibility. What receives far less attention is the layer before that: TTO itself. The people who run technology transfer offices identify promising research, manage IP, and connect researchers to markets. They face their own structural talent challenge, one that precedes every founding team decision.
Christophe Haunold has worked in technology transfer across French engineering schools, the University of Luxembourg, and as a former president of ASTP. The conversation settled on the operational layer that sits behind every founding team question: where do the people who run TTOs come from, and what keeps them there?
There Is No Standard Profile
Christophe started with the structural gap: TTO roles lack a natural talent pipeline. Scientific backgrounds were once considered sufficient, and over time, institutions added legal and IP specialists, then commercial operators, then people with fundraising experience. Today, a well-functioning TTO needs all of those. Every hire is, in some sense, a custom search.
This is different from most sectors where professional training and career pathways are established. A corporate HR department recruits from a recognizable pool. A law firm recruits from law schools. A TTO has no equivalent feeder system. Institutions cannot recruit from a pipeline that does not exist.
The Retention Problem Is Structural
Finding the right people is one challenge. Keeping them is another.
Small TTO teams have limited internal mobility by design. If a senior person is not moving, the people below them have few options for advancement within the same institution. Christophe named the consequence directly: career progression for TTO professionals often means moving between institutions, or in some cases, moving out of the TTO entirely.
Christophe gave a concrete example from France: in some French tech transfer organizations, TTO staff actually leave with projects. They enter the pre-incorporation period of a spinout, become deeply embedded in the development of the company, and eventually move out to co-found it. In the right institutional context, that pathway creates a useful pipeline. These are professionals who understand both the research side and the commercial side, who have built trust with the founding researcher, and who have direct skin in the outcome.
Institutions that could treat this as a deliberate talent model rarely do. The question is never framed that way.
Alumni Are Underused and Undermanaged
When I asked Christophe where TTOs source talent beyond their own staff, the answer came with a structural caveat: alumni networks at European universities are rarely managed as a professional resource. The comparison to the United States is instructive here. American institutions have built alumni engagement as an institutional function over decades, driven partly by fundraising and partly by a stronger cultural sense of institutional belonging. Former students who have built companies, managed capital, or developed expertise relevant to a spinout are findable.
European universities, as Christophe noted, are only beginning to treat this as a serious operational resource. The CNRS, which is the largest research organization in Europe, created an alumni network only around two years ago, despite being founded after the Second World War. That gap represents decades of relationships that were never captured, structured, or mobilized.
Alumni are a wider resource than most institutions recognize. An engaged former student or researcher can provide mentorship, co-investment, partnership access, market intelligence, and sometimes direct involvement in founding teams. Universities that manage these relationships as a strategic asset have a structural advantage. Most do not manage them at all.
The Ecosystem Is Useful but Unqualified
Beyond alumni, Christophe pointed to innovation agencies, funding panel evaluators, and associations of industrial companies as sources of qualified advisors. All contain people with relevant experience and are accessible to institutions that look for them.
The qualification challenge is harder. Christophe named the qualification problem directly: a population of consultants and advisors eager to work with universities, but with no shared standard for assessing their competence. The only reliable signal is a track record, which means the institutions best positioned to find good advisors are the ones that already have strong networks, creating an advantage that compounds over time.
People who have built and exited companies bring something the university system cannot provide directly: a concrete reference point for what company creation actually looks like from the inside. For PhD students and early researchers, seeing it happen in the same corridor changes what they consider a viable option.
When to Bring in the Business Side
The timing question is the one Christophe was most conditional about: when should a business-oriented person enter a project that has not yet committed to a creation pathway? His answer distinguished between two moments in the process.
Bringing in someone with practical application experience early, before commercialization is even on the table, can help a researcher understand that their work has relevance beyond academic peers and students. At that stage, the researcher has not committed to a commercialization path. The conversation carries no commercial expectation on either side.
Pushing toward business development, marketing, and commercial structure too early is a different matter. Many researchers will disengage if they feel the conversation has shifted toward monetization before they have decided they want to create a company. The productive moment is when the researcher has decided to explore forming a company. At that point, market knowledge becomes genuinely useful, not as a reorientation of the research, but as input to maturation: raising the technological readiness level and developing market understanding in parallel.
TTOs that have built trust with their researchers have more flexibility on timing because the conversation is framed as support rather than pressure.
What TTOs Are Actually Evaluating
The two criteria Christophe applies consistently are passion and team. Does the researcher care enough about this specific body of work to stay engaged through a long and uncertain process? At a given point, if the researcher says the work is no longer their focus or no longer interests them, the transfer opportunity is lost entirely. On the team, he looks not at the eventual founding team (which often does not exist yet) but at the research group itself. A professor with three post-doctoral researchers and two PhD students, all working in the same field, signals a strategic transfer opportunity. A single PhD student or post-doctoral researcher, about to leave the university, working on a standalone topic with no surrounding research group and no intention of maintaining contact with their lab, is a different foundation entirely.
He also mentioned receptiveness: whether the researcher will actually act on advice. TTOs give direction. If that direction is consistently ignored, the relationship becomes unproductive. The question is whether the TTO and the researcher have a functional working relationship.
The CRM Gap
The structural recommendation Christophe returned to most clearly was knowledge management. Universities accumulate relationships at scale: industrial partners, government agencies, research collaborators, funders, alumni, and evaluators from funding panels. Most of that contact history is not captured in any systematic way.
A CRM is the starting point for any organization that needs to source talent, find advisors, or connect researchers with the right people at the right moment. The institutions that have built this infrastructure, even informally, are better positioned. Every function that depends on finding the right person quickly benefits from it.
Universities are, as Christophe put it, huge stakeholders in their regions. They employ people, buy goods and services, maintain government relationships, and sit at the center of a wide web of professional connections. That contact history, accumulated over decades, is not captured in most institutions. Institutions that have it can execute faster on team-building, partnership development, and market access. Institutions that do not are rebuilding their contact base with every new project.
The Culture Gap with the United States
Every participant in Christophe's staff exchange between European and American TTOs came back with the same observation: the structural problems are the same on both sides. Deal flow, talent gaps, qualification challenges, staff retention. The best ecosystems, however, show impressive deal flow, a strong embedded industrial fabric, including corporates, SMEs, customers, suppliers, and technological partners, and a tightly connected local network linking science, industry, business, and funding. That combination is not evenly distributed on either continent.
The meaningful difference is cultural. In American research environments, it is normal for a professor to be involved in private activity alongside public research. Proximity between labs and companies is common. Failure is accepted as part of the process. The social cost of a spinout that does not work is low. The result is visible in the physical layout of research environments: professors who have created companies, visiting researchers with private activity, and sometimes private companies operating in the same corridor as public labs. Researchers see it happening close to them. That proximity changes what they consider possible.
In Europe, that normalcy does not yet exist uniformly. The conflict of interest question creates distance between public research and private activity. In some European research environments, attempting to create a company still marks a researcher as the outlier in their lab. And the cultural reference points, seeing someone in your immediate environment who has done it, are less common.
The Practical Starting Point
The talent problem in university venture is not going to be solved by a single program or a new hiring framework. Data management, career design, alumni engagement, advisor qualification, and cultural norms are all part of the same structural condition.
Build the database. Capture the contacts. Know who passed through, what they built, and whether they would stay connected to the university's research activity. From that foundation, the institution can identify the right person without starting from zero.
Most have never treated that position as a talent infrastructure asset.
Timecode:
00:00 Talent and Spin-Off Growth
01:09 Hiring Challenges in TTOs
02:23 Retention and Venture Builders
04:07 Where to Source Talent
06:46 Making Universities Attractive
08:05 Matchmaking Founders and Operators
10:08 What Makes Spin-Offs Succeed
13:00 Advice Data CRM and Trust
15:19 Right Size for TTOs
17:32 When to Add Business Talent
19:36 Incentives for Business Partners
21:10 What TTOs Look For in Pitches
24:14 Beyond STEM Interdisciplinary Spin-Offs
26:34 Europe vs US Culture and Alumni
30:36 Closing Thoughts on Alumni Networks
Links:
Thijmen Meijer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thmnmr/?skipRedirect=true
Thijmen Meijer Personal Website: https://www.thijmenmeijer.com/
UniVCC: https://univccoalition.org/
Guest:
Christophe Haunold: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christophe-haunold/
Transcript:
Thijmen Meijer: Thank you so much, Christophe, for being here with me. Basically, what we are going to talk about is the talent side of the TTOs the Tech Transfer Offices where we can improve, the current state, and what the basic learnings are. My first question to you is: if there is an increase in spin-offs in certain TTOs and universities, would this be better or worse in regards to finding the right talent?
Christophe Haunold: I would say both, actually. In a way, it's something exciting. To create a company, you can communicate that to your students and external people and say, "Well, we create value, we create new adventures." Creating a company is exciting; you can create your own jobs if you join us. But at the same time, if you increase the number of spin-offs, the pool might be too small.
Thijmen Meijer: Mm. Okay.
Christophe Haunold: Universities always have this issue about attracting people attracting students, researchers, and staff. For instance, in the TTOs, we see this difficulty. It's not so easy to find the right profile because there is no formal training for that. If you think about what sort of profiles we need in the TTOs, they are very diverse. It was very classical to take scientific people and then "paint" them with some legal aspects, finance, and communication. Then we started also to hire real legal people and IP people. That's a wide diversity, and we find this difficulty of finding the right profiles for TTOs. Now for the spin-offs, we have to find the right people to create the spin-off, and this is again a different profile.
Thijmen Meijer: And in regards to the internal talent at a TTO, what would you say is the biggest bottleneck? What is the biggest competence or skill that you're looking for?
Christophe Haunold: It's difficult, actually, to find experienced people and to keep them.
Thijmen Meijer: Mm.
Christophe Haunold: Because the evolution within a TTO is not so simple to organize, especially if the boss is young. You will have all these Knowledge Transfer Officers, and if we are talking about a small team, there are not so many possibilities for internal evolution. That means some people might think about a career by moving moving from one institution to another, staying in the same country, or changing countries. Staff management is not so simple in small teams. One possibility is for TTO people to go out and create a company. This is what happened, for instance, in some of the French tech transfer companies. You would have people dealing with technical or commercial aspects of projects, and they would actually leave with a project and be part of the creation of the spin-off. This is something I think is quite interesting.
Thijmen Meijer: Yeah, indeed. I would call them venture builders. Is that an "entrepreneur in residence" kind of role?
Christophe Haunold: It's not always named that, but yes, that could be part of the pre-incorporation period starting the business without creating the company. When it's ready, the people move on because they are very familiar with the project, they are involved, and they see opportunities.
Thijmen Meijer: Got it. And besides the alumni of the university I’m guessing the university has some kind of database where else would a TTO or a university VC fund get their talent from? Where would you find these people?
Christophe Haunold: That's a very good question. Alumni are not always very organized; you would be surprised. Some universities, as is the case in Luxembourg, have now designed new departments including TTOs, incubators, alumni, and fundraising, because it's all part of a similar approach: building new opportunities and creating new value with very different stakeholders. The common part of all this is probably alumni, because they can work in companies involved in research partnerships, they can fund new companies, they can be part of the spin-off systems, they can provide advice, and they can also provide funds for the university.
So that's an interesting source, but it is not the only one. Another source is basically the existing ecosystem, because around innovation, you will find many consultants, advisors, and mentors. One of the difficulties is to qualify them. What is the quality of this network? This is a bit touchy because it's very difficult to have a "blacklist" of non-competent people who are eager to work for the university and get paid. On the other hand, it's very fruitful to discuss with existing entrepreneurs and get feedback from people who succeeded. You will find them around the funds, startups associations, and industrial companies. What the universities have to do is also provide attractive information about the university. We must be "sexy" in our projects to explain that it can be very interesting for them, even if they are very busy or successful entrepreneurs. It might be interesting for them to give time to students or spin-off creators.
Thijmen Meijer: And could you elaborate on that? How can you make a university "sexy" in regards to this?
Christophe Haunold: I think we are talking about the quality of the projects. That means we have to show our successes. Success is creating something new and something good for the country. It's very important to demonstrate that, especially in new ecosystems. You have to demonstrate that this is useful for the region, the country, and Europe. You also have to demonstrate that it can be a good opportunity for investors, not only for money, but also regarding the impact you are going to create. You will find people really interested in the environment, creating jobs, or creating new drugs. The health sector is something that attracts fundraising because it's easy for people to understand. For personal reasons, people are really interested in supporting new solutions to health problems.
Thijmen Meijer: My background is in headhunting, so I'm used to connecting people. Could you walk me through the process of connecting the researcher-founder and the business person the venture builder, or whatever name we use?
Christophe Haunold: Either you organize special days about funding, innovation, or new research projects and try to invite the right persons using your ecosystem, innovation agencies, ministries, and different bodies in charge of generating these contacts or you use your own database. You mentioned alumni earlier. Or you use your personal links. That takes time because researchers have a surprising number of links due to their international activities; research is very international by definition. They can be connected to many people in different countries, especially in countries very involved in tech transfer. They see this network and are sometimes able to mobilize people and get mentors from other continents to check on certain projects. You will also find members of panels; different countries and funding agencies attract evaluators. It's always interesting to talk to these people because they go around to several countries or agencies and have very good experience; they might be interested in investing in some of your projects.
Thijmen Meijer: Okay. Gotcha.
Christophe Haunold: I'm not sure I answered the real question.
Thijmen Meijer: Well, it was pretty good. If we talk about success stories when and where can you give some examples of where it actually succeeded? Is it because of the individual researcher? Is it about the structure and the incentive for the business person, or perhaps just the whole cultural aspect, because in certain regions or universities it just works better?
Christophe Haunold: It's probably a mix of the three, plus luck. But the central part is the person. You are completely right. You can see very quickly what sort of people you are dealing with if they are happy with negotiating, if they are more on the projection side, if they want to create something to make money, if they want to pass something to their children, or if they just want to have fun. You can see the different types of people, and that is very important if you want to create a team. You have to play with this diversity and complementarity.
The person is essential. Then the cultural aspects are very important as well. Are you in an ecosystem where it's normal to succeed this way? Is it normal to try and fail, or is that an exception? Are you going to be the "black sheep" in your lab because you tried to create a company? Cultural acceptance of creating a company is vital. Then the support of the ecosystem is major. If you are alone and have to invent everything on your own, it will be much more difficult. So usually it's a mixture. You have good support from the ecosystem, you are ready to be part of an entrepreneurial team, and of course, you build on a good idea or product. This is almost self-evident because in universities we have the chance to provide many good ideas. This is a real strength in our system because our students are very creative. We have to support these people with the right education and awareness-raising not trying to transform them into fully skilled business people, but giving them the keys to understand and identify the important points so they can get the necessary support and talk to investors, legal, and commercial people.
Thijmen Meijer: If you were to give advice to a university about how to improve the founding teams, what kind of advice would you give?
Christophe Haunold: First, I would really consider managing the knowledge and the data, because I think universities have much useful information and many useful contacts. I'm not sure we always manage them in a professional way. This is not only a database; that could be the start of a CRM, for instance. I'm not sure many universities actually have a practical CRM. Universities are huge stakeholders in a region and country because they are big employers; they buy many things and are part of the economic life. That brings many natural contacts. They are in contact with many government offices and industrial partners. How do we keep track of that? By knowing this network, you enrich your own database of useful contacts through experience. "I've worked with this company," "Oh, and they had a deal with this venture capital," "How did it end?" This is the way we should go: organize and keep track of all the information we have about the people we work with. But this is not always the case. We must also be very clear on our rules and the way we work. This is part of the trust. Once a university is trusted, we attract people. If things are not clear, if processes are not clear, or if people have an image of a huge, heavy body lacking flexibility and reactivity, then we are not attractive. Does it answer your question?
Thijmen Meijer: Yes. In regards to the TTOs, you mentioned earlier off-record about smaller TTOs and larger TTOs that cover a whole region, like in France. What would work better in your case? Is it a smaller university-focused TTO or something regional? I'm asking because in Oxford or at the University of Munich, they have very large teams to support these spin-offs. What would you say is the best combination?
Christophe Haunold: There is no "one size fits all." You have to adapt it to the reality of your ecosystem. The critical mass must be calculated in regards to the capacity of your region to absorb all the science results and new companies you are going to create, because proximity is very important. The size must be adapted to this critical mass. If you want to have a complete team providing a full range of services, then you need a pipeline to feed this team so they can work. I would say the best solution is probably between a single national office in a country that would make sense in Germany, France, or Spain and the regional scale. But again, it depends on the region. You have poorer regions and very rich regions full of competencies and research, and they must be treated differently. You also have to take into account the history of the different institutions you're working with.
Thijmen Meijer: In regards to the process, where do you think it's best to have a business person next to the researcher? Is it prior to the pitch to the TTO, or after? When do you think this matchmaking should be happening?
Christophe Haunold: It depends on the objective. If you just want the researcher to understand that his or her research might interest people other than just peers or students, then it's good to have somebody with experience in practical application. But it's not very good to talk too early about commercialization, marketing, and business because many researchers will not be interested and say, "No, I'm not doing this job for business or money." But as soon as we decide that the pathway to effective transfer could go through the creation of a company, then from that moment, you should bring in people who know the market just to feed the discussion. We are not going to change the research or define new research tracks based on the market, but we can launch some maturation projects bringing a better readiness level for a product, so Technological Readiness Level, but also understanding of the market. For this, you can have the people talk together as early as possible. We sometimes have these profiles in the TTOs. If there is a trusting relationship between the TTO and the researchers, then we can talk about the possibility without imposing anything.
Thijmen Meijer: Besides the impact and long-term goals that this business person may have, what kind of incentive would there be for them? Is it a share of the equity, a monthly fee, or how would it work?
Christophe Haunold: What we see is that either we have passionate people who love to be next to projects, students, or young researchers simply because they love it. Some don't need money because they had a very good exit previously or are retired, and it is just their pleasure to accompany these projects. Many others are involved in maturation projects and they get paid simply because it's planned in the project. For instance, what we call proof of concept projects usually provide some funding for advisors, mentors, coaches, or entrepreneurs in residence. There is an advantage to that: if you pay somebody, you can expect deliverables. If you are just on a goodwill basis, it's a bit different. And of course, there is always a possibility to get them on board afterwards and offer them shares in a future company.
Thijmen Meijer: Yeah. And if a researcher is pitching to you at a TTO, what things are you paying attention to? What would turn this conversation into an actual engagement? For instance, at a market VC, it's often about the founder understanding sales and how to bring the product to B2B or B2C. But with a researcher, there's a different element; this person probably doesn't have born sales skills.
Christophe Haunold: They never "pitch" because the TTO is at the service of the researcher. We are a support service. We have to be very convincing to identify interesting results. The first step is to define with them what interesting results are. To me, that's very simple: it's something that could become something other than just a publication. We know the main objective for researchers, because this is how they are evaluated, is to publish. Our first job is to explain that sometimes things have to be protected before publication because these results might be interesting for a third-party activity or the creation of a company. That is the first step; in that case, we pitch to them to convince them. Then when I talk to a researcher, I always consider: is this researcher passionate about what they are doing? That is very important. At a given point, if a researcher says, "I've got no time for that, it's not my focus anymore," then we lose everything. Is that the heart of the research, and will it be interesting for more than just a few months?
The second thing I look at is the team in this case, not the spin-off team because we are not talking about spin-offs yet, but the research team. Are we talking about a PhD student alone, or a professor with three post-docs and two PhD students all working in the same field? In that case, it can become a strategic action and is a very good basis for transfer. I'm looking at the team, and I'm also looking at the capacity of the researchers to listen. We are going to give much advice, and if they never follow any of it, it's frustrating and not efficient. These are the main things: Is it really part of something interesting for the researcher? Have they got a scientific team able to proceed on this project? And will it be a practical relationship?
Thijmen Meijer: In your whole career, you have mostly dealt with STEM-related spin-offs, I'm guessing?
Christophe Haunold: No.
Thijmen Meijer: No? Please elaborate.
Christophe Haunold: I'm an engineer, so you're right that I started in a polytechnic institute in France, which was very industry-oriented and I worked with many engineers. But then I worked for the Federal University of Toulouse, and that included humanities, legal studies, social sciences, economy, and so on. I learned then to work with very different people. For instance, at the University of Luxembourg, half of our spin-offs and more than half of our IP actually comes from non-STEM fields.
Thijmen Meijer: That's very interesting.
Christophe Haunold: Because we have very strong skills in education and psychology. We created a company, for instance, selling new software for teaching mathematics without using languages. It's a great success. Of course, we are talking about software because you need the support, so IT is very present. Now many projects talk about AI because it's fashionable, but the heart of the research is not always scientific and technological, and there is big value there. Humanity today faces very complex problems. The answer to these problems cannot be mono-disciplinary. We will talk about science and technology, legal aspects, acceptance, psychology, and the way people react to these new solutions. You can see that in many fields AI, of course, or the space industry. Health is really an issue where you have to mix science, technology, and humanities.
Thijmen Meijer: Clear. Thank you. Regarding cultural differences we mentioned those in Europe, but there are also many differences from the US. As a former president of the ASTP, how do you see these cultural differences in regards to spin-offs?
Christophe Haunold: With the States, first there is this idea that they are valorizing their own activity much better than we do. They do this and talk like this, and we do the opposite. We organized a staff exchange with the States for TTOs. It was really funny because most of them came back and said, "We are the same." We just communicate less about our success. Of course, they have huge successes like MIT and Stanford, but apart from this, the average university in the States has the same problems we have here. One big cultural difference is the capacity for researchers to get involved in spin-offs. It's very natural, and it's okay if you fail. It's okay if you do both public research and companies. Most research is not actually public these days when you look at it. The pressure on researchers is much higher; many researchers have to get out and find their own funding. The mindset is very different, so creating a company is much more natural. One very efficient thing is when students or PhD students can see experienced people in the lab who created companies professors, friends of professors, or visiting professors. It's very natural to see private activities very close to the lab. This is not so common in Europe. We try to organize places where people can meet. You could see public labs and private companies in the same corridor. But this is not so simple in the cultural approach in Europe because there is always this question of how we manage conflict of interest. Are we sharing the same objectives? Obviously not. Is it compatible? Yes.
Thijmen Meijer: Are we then overcautious in Europe?
Christophe Haunold: It depends on the philosophy you have about that. It's a question of academic freedom and not having too much pressure from the private sector, but it might be a bit naive.
Thijmen Meijer: Is there something we can learn from the States in regards to alumni? They have better-organized alumni databases than many European countries.
Christophe Haunold: Yes. Maybe because of historical reasons they had to build this sort of belonging to the same institution. For instance, in France, until recently it was very weak. We are very proud in France of the École d'Ingénieurs, the engineering schools. Some of them had alumni approaches, but many did not. The cultural approach about alumni and belonging to the same family is much stronger in the States. I mentioned the CNRS, the biggest research organization in Europe; it is huge and they only created an alumni network two years ago.
Thijmen Meijer: Mm.
Christophe Haunold: They are almost 100 years old.
Thijmen Meijer: Already?
Christophe Haunold: It was created after the Second World War.
Thijmen Meijer: Ah, okay.