The North Carolina Biotechnology Center has hired Rick Williams to lead the NCBC’s new Business Acceleration and Technology Outlicensing Network, also known as BATON.
Prior to joining NCBS, Williams served as chief business officer of CellzDirect. He has also served as executive vice president at Amerisource Bergen, and has held sales, marketing, and corporate development positions with Merck and Genentech.
The NCBC established BATON and its related Technology Enhancement and Acceleration Model, or TEAM, loan program to help North Carolina’s public and private universities and research institutions start companies based on university research-derived patents (see BTW, 7/2/07).
UTEK, a technology-transfer facilitation company, last week said that it has appointed Henry Chesbrough as a strategic advisor.
In his role, Chesbrough will assist UTEK with its Open Innovation program, a strategy to accelerate corporate innovation through the acquisition of externally developed discoveries with the outlicensing of internally developed intellectual property.
Chesbrough is currently an adjunct professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and is executive director of the Center for Open Innovation at the Institute of Management, Innovation, and Organization. He holds a PhD from UC-Berkeley and an MBA from StanfordUniversity.
The California Healthcare Institute has elected Hans Bishop and Catherine Mackey to its board of directors.
Bishop is head of the Hematology/Cardiology Business Unit of Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals and has worked at Chiron, Glaxo Wellcome, and SmithKline Beecham.
Mackey is senior vice president of Pfizer Global Research and Development and formerly worked at Monsanto and Dekalb.