The Focused Guide Team

The Focused Guide is brought to you by the following six individuals:

• Richard S. Cahoon – Author
• John A. Fraser – Author
• Ashley J. Stevens – Author
• Lauren Cahoon Roberts – Editor-in-chief
• Agnes Bantigue-Bonafe – Editor and WordPress translation
• JP B. Bantigue – WordPress developer and content manager

The Team wishes to thank the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Commercial Law Development Program of the United States Department of Commerce for the support they provided during the development of the Focused Guide.

Dr. Cahoon has nearly forty years’ experience in entrepreneurship, intellectual property (IP) strategy, licensing, business development, negotiation, and mediation. He is President of BioProperty Strategy Group, Inc, an international intellectual property (IP) management and technology commercialization consulting firm, serves as faculty for Cornell University, and was recently appointed as a senior advisor to the Commercial Law Development Program of the U.S. Department of Commerce.  

He served as director of technology transfer at Cornell University for twenty years, managing the IP and technology transfer policies and functions  and overseeing hundreds of technologies and license agreements. As president of BioProperty Strategy Group, Dr. Cahoon advises companies, universities, governments, and non-profit organizations on IP, technology transfer and commercialization policies and practices. Among other areas, he specializes in plant-related IP and bioproperty. He has helped create many new start-ups, served as a board member of several companies and non-profit organizations, and acted as an expert advisor of the International IP Licensing Platform for Vegetable Breeding Companies in the Netherlands. 

Dr. Cahoon often serves as an expert in IP litigations and has conducted numerous IP/technology valuations. He advises organizations in IP management, including the World Bank, the governments of Qatar, Thailand, Philippines, the State of Michigan as well as universities, companies, and NGOs in Turkey, Chile, Japan, Jamaica, Philippines, South Africa, India, Korea, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, the United States, and the European Union. He led a multi-year project in eight countries for the World Intellectual Property Organization establishing innovation systems in developing countries through IP/technology transfer from public-sector research institutions. 

At Cornell, he teaches courses in invention and IP management, technology commercialization, and entrepreneurship, and leads numerous workshops and seminars in the United States and internationally. He has recently launched an on-line Cornell University certificate course on invention and IP management.

He received undergraduate degrees in political science and history from the University of Utah; an M.S. in bioprocessing from Montana State University, and a PhD from Cornell University in natural resources. Dr. Cahoon is also an inventor and patentee himself.

As president of the consulting firm Burnside Development & Associates, Mr. Fraser mentors clients in academic technology transfer commercialization, including technology scouting, commercialization, start-up formation/financing and customer discovery.  

The co-founder of three companies, Mr. Fraser has also assisted entrepreneurs in the launch of over 40 university-licensed technology firms and launched four university technology transfer offices (TTOs).

Current clients are in Chile (universities); in India (biotech TTOs); the World Intellectual Property Organization as an international expert mentoring academic TTOs in Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand; the World Bank as licensing expert at the Serbian Innovation Fund, and in the United States at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland as Entrepreneur-in-Residence.  He also mentored the winner of the Chilean technology company national competition.

For 18 years, Mr. Fraser served as Assistant VP for Research & Economic Development at Florida State University. He founded the TTO, hired staff and built relationships with researchers to create a dynamic results-oriented service office.

Prior to this, he served as: president, CEO and board director of University Technologies International, the for-profit technology transfer office of the University of Calgary; executive vice president/co-founder of UTC, Inc., a venture-capital backed, North Carolina-based university licensing/technology transfer firm.  This for-profit venture provided academic technology transfer services to four U.S. universities on an exclusive basis and to the Smithsonian Institution. The business was sold in 1989. Mr. Fraser also served as vice president of TDC, Inc., a Toronto/Vancouver-based venture capital firm and as an awards officer of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) in Ottawa. 

In 2006, he was elected president and chair of the board of AUTM, the global association of technology transfer professionals headquartered in the United States.

John earned a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and graduated in 1969 with a BSc. chemistry, 1^st Class Honours, Carleton University, Ottawa.

As president of the Focus IP Group, Dr. Stevens consults on intellectual property matters, including technology transfer, assessment, valuation and scouting as well as professional development for technology transfer professionals, teaching early-stage technology commercialization and serving as an expert witness in intellectual property disputes.

Dr. Stevens led Boston University’s Office of Technology Transfer for 15 years, during which over 50 university-research-based companies were launched, many raising substantial amounts of capital, and the university’s licensing income climbed steadily. He was special assistant to the Vice President for Research and lecturer at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, where he taught two graduate-level, inter-disciplinary courses on technology commercialization. He also served as director of the Office of Technology Transfer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

As guest professor at Osaka University, Japan, he taught technology commercialization, and as principal investigator at the National University of Singapore (Suzhou) Research Institute, he taught professional development courses on technology management. He has also taught in Belgium, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, India, Iran, Holland, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Switzerland and Thailand.

Dr. Stevens has also worked in the biotechnology industry for nearly a decade, co-founding Kytogenics, Inc. and Genmap, Inc., and serving as vice president of business development for BioTechnica International. He held several positions at The Procter & Gamble Company in commercial development, sales, marketing, product management, strategic planning and acquisitions and mergers.

Dr. Stevens publishes and lectures on technology transfer, including the Bayh-Dole Act, academia’s impact on drug discovery and therapeutics, and technology transfer’s role in global health and technology valuation. He was the recipient of the Bayh-Dole Award at the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) in 2007 and became president of AUTM in March 2010. He is also active in the Licensing Executives Society. Dr. Stevens holds a bachelor’s in natural sciences, a master’s and PhD in physical chemistry from Oxford University. He is a certified licensing professional and a registered Technology Transfer Professional.

Lauren Cahoon Roberts specializes in science, health and tech communications. She holds a bachelor’s in biology from Cornell University and a master’s in science journalism from Boston University. She has written for outlets including Science, Nature Medicine, Popular Mechanics, and ABC Health News, and currently works as director of communications at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine.

Agnes Bantigue-Bonafe is a technology transfer professional with over a decade’s worth of experience in academia. She started her career in the University of the Philippines (UP) – Diliman in 2012, where she evaluated invention disclosures based on market potential and conducted business development functions, including negotiation of licenses and valuation of technologies. In 2017, she was leading a team of eight tech transfer officers and assistants in UP Diliman’s tech transfer unit, before it formally had its director. She was instrumental in negotiating and securing licenses that generated revenues, albeit modest, for the university, developing programs for internal technology transfer bridge funding, and the formal creation of the Technology Transfer and Business Development Office of UP Diliman, among others. 

Agnes has led numerous seminars and talks on IP in the Philippines, including those sponsored by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines. She has also mentored participants in the Knowledge & Technology Transfer Office Mentorship Program funded and organized by the Department of Science and Technology and the USAID-STRIDE.

In 2021, Agnes joined the then-start-up Philippine Space Agency as its first Chief of Space Business Development, where she led the launch of the program that would pilot-test low earth orbit satellites in geographically disadvantaged areas of the country. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Ontario, Canada and joined Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo as Industry Liaison Specialist, helping faculty and researchers with industry partnerships, managing the university’s tech transfer and IP portfolio, and facilitating sponsored research contracts. 

Agnes served as Vice President for Metrics for the Alliance of TechTransfer Professionals of the Philippines, Inc., which she co-founded in 2019 with her colleagues from different universities and government agencies. With support from consultants of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), she developed the report for the pilot survey of tech transfer activities and metrics in the Philippines.

Agnes has an LLM in Intellectual Property which she obtained as a scholar of WIPO under the joint LLM program of WIPO and the University of Turin, Italy, and an MBA and a BS Business Economics from UP Diliman.

John Paul “JP” Bantigue graduated with a BS Mathematics major in Actuarial Science in the University of Santo Tomas. He started his career as an actuarial associate in a growing start-up in the field but he felt he had a different calling. JP started his career as a designer and developer when he joined a small start-up company in the Philippines that specialized in developing apps and websites for businesses in the real-estate industry. Coincidentally thereafter, he joined the offshore team of an Australian intellectual property firm as the firm’s Digital Manager. He is now a UI/UX Designer at Arcadian PH working primarily on Sony Pictures Entertainment’s digital products, while engaging in consulting services during his free time.

JP’s interest in creating and building is manifested in his services to help businesses flourish: He offers full-stack development services, from UI/UX design to development, focusing primarily on custom, responsive and mobile-friendly websites, either via the WordPress framework or building websites from the ground up. He has also dabbled in app development using Cordova, Android Studio and XCode, and is also knowledgeable in SEO, lead gen, creating backlinks for businesses, and is proficient in data analysis and visualizations. He also offers freelance design services in various applications including branding and identity, invitations and stationery, t-shirt prints, vector/vexel art and other layout designs. His projects, both personal and professional, can be viewed on his website at jpbbantigue.com.

Outside of work, JP is a casual gamer on both PC and tabletop (traditional) platforms, and a blogger.