The National Council of Entrepreneurial Tech Transfer (NCET2) represents an informal group of universities from around the country who seek to bring entrepreneurs and private equity investors into the innovation economy through involvement in the creation and funding of tech transfer start-ups at the university.

The term "entrepreneurial tech transfer" is used to highlight the focus on entrepreneur recruitment, start-up creation, and funding, in contrast to traditional tech transfer, which generally relies on licensing patents to more established companies as a means to commercialize university and federal lab R&D.

But while traditional tech transfer has been very successful within its own established communities, entrepreneurial tech transfer generally has new stakeholders with different objectives, styles, time horizons and perspectives (e.g., deans, alumni, graduate students, entrepreneurial faculty, area entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists, and in many cases the university in the unfamiliar role as shareholder). NCET2 provides a new forum for those stakeholders to share experiences and create a constructive dialog on how to best work together in this relatively new and exciting area.

The purpose of the conference is to offer a national venue for the major players of entrepreneurial tech transfer to meet, discuss and network on best practices for:

• working with universities (especially angel, venture and private equity investors),
• creating university-affiliated companies, and
• improving the national innovation economy.