A national technology-transfer company is looking to grow its presence in the Northwest through a 2-year-old branch office here headed by a former commercialization technology manager at the Spokane Intercollegiate Research and Technology Institute.


Jim Roberts, the former SIRTI manager, heads the regional office here for Providence, R.I.-based Foresight Science & Technology Inc., which has academic and commercial clients across the country, including such big concerns as Boeing Co., Dow Chemical Corp., and IBM Corp.


The tiny office here, which includes just Roberts and one contract employee, is one of four regional offices the company now operates. Roberts says that as more regional business is landed here, the office will grow. He already expects that it will add two contract employees this year, perhaps one in Spokane and one in the Seattle area.


The company offers a variety of services, all aimed at helping companies or universities that have new inventions or existing patents find ways to commercialize those technologies.


About half of its business currently is from federal agencies that have awarded Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants. Among those agencies are the National Institutes of Health, the departments of Energy and Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Science Foundation.


When they make those awards, they pay us to work with the companies to ensure that technologies have a good chance of being commercialized, says Roberts. There were concerns that not a lot of technology was getting to market.


The rest of Foresights business involves consulting directly with universities and companies that do their own research or own patents. In that role, the company provides a variety of services, ranging from a three-week Go/No Go assessment to determine whether a technology is worth attempting to commercialize to developing a complete commercialization plan.


Among the tasks it performs are doing market analysis on a potential product, finding partners or licensees for those that dont want to commercialize their technologies on their own, helping to find product-development financing, or structuring technology-transfer deals. It also helps client companies find and license technologies that they need but others have developed.


The company charges package fees ranging from about $1,500 to tens of thousands of dollars, and the projects usually last three to six weeks. At the university level, the customer usually is a university foundation responsible for technology transfer, and often Foresight is hired either because the universitys technology transfer office is too small to handle some assessments or wants to have an outside, objective entity analyze a university researchers ideas. The companies Foresight targets usually are larger, with established research programs, but sometimes also are startups working to get their first product to market.


They might have existing patents and we find a market or licensee for them, or they have invention disclosure that they need us to look at whether they should pursue patents, Robert says.


He opened the Spokane office of Foresight in 2002, after leaving SIRTI. Foresight, a 25-year-old company that long had been based in a single location, was just starting to branch out at that time. Because the companys regional offices are still young, much of the consulting that Roberts does is in other parts of the country, though he expects that eventually hell concentrate more in the Northwest. Currently, hes working with three to four clients at any given time.


To build clientele here, hes doing a lot of cold calling on companies and universities, and has begun to establish a relationship with the University of Idaho.


I see a lot of potential with WSU, U of I, Montana, and the national labs in Richland, Roberts says.


Companywide, Foresight has roughly 25 employees and 10 to 15 contract workers, but those numbers are growing, Roberts says. All have backgrounds in science, technology, or law, he says. Roberts has a law degree and a masters degree in geology, and prior to working for SIRTI, was a senior scientist at Westinghouse Hanford Co. at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.