From Wednesday, January 25 to Sunday, January 29, Dr. Jane Muir, Director, Florida Innovation Hub of the University of Florida, visited Switzerland to address several audiences on the topic of technology transfer.
While in Switzerland, Muir delivered the keynote address at the annual Swiss Technology Transfer Association (swiTT) conference in Interlaken. At a separate event at the Impact Hub in Bern, she discussed innovation, entrepreneurship in the U.S., women in tech professions, and described the University of Florida’s approach to tech transfer. Muir’s main message was that support for technology transfer pays, and the resulting products can change the world and make people’s lives better. Muir also said that the survival rate of start-ups that have had the support of an incubator is considerably higher than that of those that haven’t. On the topic of women in tech, she stressed the importance of educating, inspiring and empowering women in all phases of the innovation life cycle, because diversity in all these phases will in the end lead to better results.
Dr. Muir’s career spans three decades with a broad range of professional experiences in marketing, management, and technology transfer. She spent the first decade of her career in the private sector and for the past 20 plus years she has held leadership roles in technology transfer at the University of Florida. She currently serves as Director of the Florida Innovation Hub at UF – a unique 50,000-sq.-ft. incubator — and Director of UF Tech Connect. She is co-founder of Empowering Women in Technology Startups and Startup Quest; both programs targeted at providing experiential entrepreneurial training in a virtual technology startup.
