Workflows

Overview

Negotiation of Transfer Agreements (such as MTAs or DTAs) between two institutions can be a complex process involving input from multiple people. This website aims to provide an organized, yet flexible, platform for guiding this process along its many steps. This enables some steps to be automated, and the progress to be transparently tracked by all parties.

The outline of a typical workflow is illustrated below:
We provide here a general description of a workflow. More details are available on other Help Pages. The process outlined below explains the case of an Outgoing MTA/DTA, where the user who starts the process is from the Provider institution, and a draft Agreement needs to be generated. For Incoming MTAs/DTAs, the first several steps are skipped.

• Collect Info: The system collects the information needed to set up the transfer agreement: who is poviding the material and/or data, who is receiving it, the identity of the material or data being transferred, what it will be used for, if there are any usage restrictions, etc. This information will then be used by the system to automatically generate a draft agreement based on a template provided by the Technology Tranfer office of the Provider institution.
  
  It is possible to set up the workflow such that all subsequent steps are skipped, and the process goes straight to the signature step. This is useful, for example, for simple cases where the provider Technology Transfer office does not want to be involved, but only notified when the MTA/DTA is signed.
• Questionnaire: This step is optional. If the Technology Transfer office of the Provider institution wishes, the Provider Scientist is asked a series of questions which are entirely customizable, and set by the Technology Transfer office. For instance, the questions could ask:
  • Whether the Provider Scientist owns the material that he/she wishes to distribute
  • Whether the Recipient institution is an academic institution or a for-profit entity.
  • Whether the Material is a Genetically Modified Organism.
  The answers to these questions will affect:
  • Whether the process continues or is put on hold and turned over to Technology Transfer
  • What clauses and/or Annexes are added to the draft Agreement.
  • Who will need to review the draft agreement (e.g. Legal, Biosafety, Data Security, etc).
  • Who will need to approve the final version of the agreement.
• Draft Agreement: is automatically generated by the system based on a template provided by Technology Transfer and the information gathered above, as well as the answers to the Questionnaire. This draft agreement can then be modified.
• Reviews: Depending on the answers from the Questionnaire, and on input from the Technology Transfer department, the draft Agreement is reviewed by various functions at the Provider institution, such as Legal, Biosafety (e.g. if the material being transferred is a GMO), Data Security (e.g. if human patient data are involved), etc. These functions provide feedback to the Technology Transfer office, which directs the process. This step is also optional.
• Negotiation between parties: The Agreement file is sent back and forth between the Provider Technology Transfer department and the Recipient Technology Transfer department. Depending on whether the Provider institution and/or the Recipient institution is using TTConnect, this occurs either directly via the TTConnect platform, or via an email server that is seemlessly integrated into TTConnect, so that the other party can choose to simply reply to emails, yet all the communication is integrated into TTConnect. The website also keeps track of the document versions.
• Approvals of final version: Once both Provider and Recipient have settled on a final wording of the Transfer Agreement, it gets sent to various functions at both the Provider and Recipient institutions for approval. This step is optional, entirely customizable, and can be automatically adjusted depending on the results from the Questionnaire.
• Signatures: The system allows for many different options for how the signatures can be executed:
  • Sign wet, scan in, and upload to TTConnect.
  • Sign via any external platform and then upload to TTConnect.
  • Sign via FP Sign, which is fully integrated into TTConnect. The Agreement file is automatically uploaded to FP Sign, the signing process is automatically started, and when the signatures are complete the fully executed file is downloaded to TTConnect. For this, an account with FP Sign is required. For the future we plan to fully integrate additional 3rd party signature services such as DocuSign. If you are interested in this, please contact us.
  • Sign directly via TTConnect. People can sign online and are required to validate their email addresses (a PIN is sent to their email address and is only valid a few minutes). This is similar to an advanced electronic signature, except that the final PDF document is not 'sealed' with a digital certificate. We plan to implement this last step in the future - please let us know if you are interested. For now, this can be used to sign agreements where an Advanced digital signature is not needed.

Workflows and Transfer Agreements

The Technology Transfer office can set up different workflows, each with its own template agreement and questionnaire. Each workflow is then used as a template to generate individual Transfer Agreements and to decide which steps in the process will be executed. For instance, the template Agreement text, the Questionnaire, and who needs to review, approve, or sign may be different depending on whether it is a Material transfer, a Data transfer, whether it is incoming or outgoing, etc.