Academic researchers and the technology-transfer offices at their universities have had a prickly relationship since the latter first won a foothold on campuses two decades ago. Scientists sometimes complain that these offices are unresponsive to immediate demands, or that their generalist staff lack knowledge in specific scientific or technical fields. Once they do start working together, researchers too often view the hapless technology-transfer officer as a potential obstacle to the dream deal they had been plotting with industrial partners or financiers outside the university. Yet university technology-transfer offices have come a long way. It is time that truculent researchers recognized their worth and engaged with them constructively, in the common interest of the university and its surrounding community.

Staff in these offices have, over time, built up valuable expertise in helping to negotiate deals with outside parties. Although people sometimes assume that the offices are just there to earn cash for the university through royalty arrangements, the thinking of university administrators has moved on. It is now widely accepted that, aside from the occasional jackpot of the sort enjoyed by Columbia University in New York (whose ‘Axel patents’ for gene insertion have earned it more than $300 million), technology-transfer offices are unlikely to generate large income streams. Instead, their principal role is to develop universities' ties with business in ways that should benefit students, staff and the surrounding community.

Ideally, technology-transfer offices should be a trusted resource for university scientists.

At last month's annual meeting of the Association of University Technology Managers, which drew some 2,000 technology-transfer officials from around the world to Orlando, Florida, the association's leadership declared: “It's not about the money.” The meeting's busiest sessions were about the money, of course. But the point still stands: the remit of technology managers has grown far wider than just the collection of royalty payments.

For their part, technology managers find some researchers to be rather naive in their expectations regarding interactions with industry. Academics are sometimes slow to acknowledge potential pitfalls, such as pending ownership disputes over intellectual property. They can be too ready to sign over their future ideas in so-called ‘honeymoon’ deals, where a tightly controlled arrangement for the technology in hand would make more sense. More crucially, as technology managers see it, researchers take too sanguine a view of their would-be industrial partners, or their new-found venture-capital backers, on the other side of the table.

Like the technology managers, academic researchers are still on a learning curve. But they know much more these days about business deals, and are aware of the broader role that scientific research plays in economic development.

The interests of the technology-transfer offices are broadening out. For example, Cambridge Enterprise has some 20 staff and expertise that reaches beyond patenting and licensing agreements to the distribution of seed capital to promising young firms (see page 867). Research universities all over the world are looking for the latter: seed money from private sources is hard to find, and various mechanisms are under investigation to keep it flowing (see Nature 440, 738–739; 2006). Even in technology hotspots such as Silicon Valley, a slowing flow of venture capital for early-stage company development makes it a topic for universities to address themselves.

Ideally, technology-transfer offices should be a trusted resource for university scientists, working to protect their interests and establishing the right kind of relationships with commercial partners. Some academics can do that for themselves, but most need professional assistance.

Politicians and industrial managers increasingly view the research university as an essential source of the innovative ideas that drive modern economies. University technology managers and academics should work together to make the most of their strong position.