Celebrating 30 Years of Tech Transfer at Caltech
In 1995, 15 years after the Bayh-Dole Act was passed by Congress, allowing US universities to retain title to federally funded inventions, Caltech opened its technology transfer office. Well, perhaps ‘office' is a generous term—really, the tech transfer function started as one man: Larry Gilbert.
Due to its focus on fundamental research, Caltech was later than its peer institutions like Stanford and MIT to establish a tech transfer office. It was initially believed that, because Caltech professors pursued research mostly out of sheer love of science and learning—curiosity-driven research—they wouldn't necessarily be interested in patenting or commercializing their technologies. So for a little while, the idea of a tech transfer office was pushed to the back burner.
However, in the mid-1990's, Caltech's patent attorney, Mike Keller, and Vice Provost Dr. David Goodstein initiated the push to pursue technology patenting and commercialization on campus. After a thorough national search, in 1994, the Institute recruited its first-choice candidate, Gilbert, to gauge the interest in tech transfer on campus.
Gilbert was one of the originators of the tech transfer field. He established Boston University's tech transfer office in 1976, having been at MIT when they had established theirs. Furthermore, he was one of the co-founders of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), an organization that still exists today and now includes members from more than 800 universities, research centers, hospitals, businesses, and government organizations.
In those first few months after Gilbert arrived at Caltech, he systematically went from professor to professor, lab to lab, to discuss the technology transfer process and how it could allow professors' findings in their labs to become products and services available to everyday Americans—and the world. While some doubted whether technology transfer would succeed on campus, Dr. Goodstein said of Gilbert in 2002, "He made it work in the first instance by walking around and talking to everybody. He got to know personally all of the professors in the areas where this stuff is done." Contrary to Caltech's initial concern that faculty may not be interested in seeing their discoveries commercialized, Gilbert found that faculty members were sincerely enthusiastic about the endeavor. Gilbert's relationship-oriented approach to working with Caltech researchers continues to be foundational to how tech transfer at Caltech operates today.
Gilbert established an aggressive patenting strategy of filing a provisional patent application on every invention disclosure. This strategy was extremely effective, helping Caltech jump quickly into the top tier of US universities by number of patents, despite starting technology transfer in earnest well after many of its counterparts, and despite its relatively small number of faculty, staff, postdoc, and student researchers.
Once patent protection has been initiated, the next step of the technology transfer process is licensing. The office's licensing team comprises PhD-level scientists, subject specialists who work with Caltech researchers not only to translate their novel ideas from lab results to patent, but also to facilitate the licensing of the technology to either startup companies or established corporations.
To bring Caltech inventions to the public, Caltech prioritizes licensing to startup companies founded by Caltech faculty and/or students and postdocs who want to take technologies they worked on in the lab to market. In parallel, Caltech has long cultivated strong industry connections through its Corporate Partnerships team, which sat within the Office of Development (now Advancement and Alumni Relations) until 2014, when the team joined the technology transfer office to create today's Office of Technology Transfer and Corporate Partnerships (OTTCP). The Corporate Partnerships team helps connect industry with faculty and vice versa, facilitating research collaborations and funding agreements, gifts, and licenses to Caltech technology.
Caltech has also helped bridge the gap between research and commercialization with programs like the Gates Grubstake Fund, which was established in 1994 with a gift from former Caltech trustee Charles C. Gates Jr. to provide modest supplemental funding to professors with commercially viable projects. In 2009, Caltech trustee Jim Rothenberg worked with Gilbert to establish the Rothenberg Innovation Initiative (RI2)—originally the Caltech Innovation Initiative, it was renamed in 2017 to honor the Rothenberg Family's contributions to the program—a grant program that provides up to two years of support for transformational early-stage research with commercial potential. RI2 further narrows the gap between early-stage research and proof of concept data often required for later-stage investments to introduce a novel technology into the marketplace.
Programs like RI2 also helped OTTCP gain momentum with other programs that support and encourage Caltech entrepreneurship. In 2015, OTTCP expanded its entrepreneurship programming by establishing the Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) program, which launched with OTTCP's first EIR, Dave Licata. The EIRs, with industry and entrepreneurial experience, help provide guidance to any Caltech-associated individuals—from professors to students—on their company ideas, honing their business plans, helping with customer discovery and market research, and providing warm introductions to key opinion leaders and investors in the EIRs' networks. Soon, the program expanded to include two EIRs: one focused on the physical sciences, and the other on life sciences.
But a significant and ever-present need for any startup is funding. To help address this need, in 2021, the Caltech Seed Fund (CSF) was launched, along with an exclusive co-investment partnership with a private venture fund, Wilson Hill Ventures (WHV). In years since the CSF was first established, CSF and WHV have provided seed funding to 32 Caltech startups (as of September 2026) with investments typically in the $100k-$500k range. In 2026, Caltech received a philanthropic gift of $10M to further support the fund, which was renamed the Gates Investment Fund (GIF) in honor of the Charles C. Gates family donor, the same family that endowed the Gates Grubstake fund in 1994.
In OTTCP's most recent push to grow a thriving local innovation ecosystem and keep Caltech technology, talent, and entrepreneurship in Pasadena, the Caltech Innovation Center (CIC) opened on the corner of S Chester Ave and Del Mar Ave, just north of campus, in early 2022. This dry lab incubator provides office space to Caltech-affiliated startups as well as large corporate partners like Amazon Web Services at competitive rental rates. The close physical proximity of the CIC to campus also has the added benefit of nurturing collaborations between the Caltech lab researchers and the companies translating science into commercial use for the benefit of our society.
In addition, an incubator expansion is on the horizon: a class-A deep tech and life sciences incubator on 1364 E. Green Street on the corner of S Holliston is currently in the works. This new building will provide wet lab and other specialty research facilities along with more office space for Caltech startups and potentially even industry-leading corporations, keeping Caltech technology and talent in the area and providing a draw for even more entrepreneurs and professionals.
From a one-man office to a team of almost 30, Caltech's OTTCP has helped Caltech professors, students, and alumni take their innovations from the lab and into the hands of the public, ready to improve and transform lives. We can't wait to see what the next 30 years of Caltech entrepreneurship bring.