Arkansas State
Arkansas State University is a regional research university in Jonesboro, in the northeast of the state, and one of four research institutions in Arkansas. First classified R2 in 2018 and reaffirmed under the 2025 Carnegie criteria, it is growing quickly on the research side: expenditures passed $10 million in fiscal 2024, up more than half on the prior year and the highest since 2012, and the university is home to the Arkansas Biosciences Institute and the Catalyst Innovation Center, a life-science incubator on its campus.
Luna Acosta is Director of Technology Transfer at Arkansas State and directs the Catalyst Innovation Center. An A-State graduate three times over, with bachelor's degrees in international business and political science and an MBA from the university, she holds a certificate in entrepreneurship center management, sits on the inaugural board of BioArkansas and reviews panels for the National Science Foundation. She is the university's entire technology transfer office.
Challenge
At Arkansas State the technology transfer office is one person. Luna handles everything from teaching faculty what commercialization is, to disclosure intake, to prosecution if the university decides to file, to licensing or spinning out the result. Her bandwidth is the constraint on the whole pipeline, and the pipeline is filling: research funding at A-State roughly doubled over the past year.
Before Tradespace the process looked like most small universities'. Disclosures arrived by word of mouth, then went through a paper form, then waited for a market analysis done by graduate assistants or by Luna in what she calls her copious free time. Follow-up slipped, and a referral from leadership could sit for weeks before anyone had something to say about it.
We would do market analysis using graduate assistants, and me in my copious free time, to evaluate. And so it was hard.
Tradespace Value
Two months after implementation, Luna's vice president for research referred a faculty member to her and knew she would be talking to the researcher just before their next meeting. She took the call, and three hours later she sat down with the VPR and, instead of reporting that the conversation had gone well, handed him the IP assessment Tradespace had produced for the invention. The loop closed: a referral, a conversation, a written assessment, all inside one afternoon.
I was able to tell him not only that the conversation went well, but actually provide him with that IP assessment. It made me look very good at my job.
That speed has become the office's standard. Luna now runs a disclosure intake interview and follows up within 48 hours with the assessment and a request for more detail, which is the window she always wanted and could never hit. In the four months since the contract went live she has taken in as many disclosures as she would normally see in a year. Tradespace's marketing summaries do the part she found hardest to staff: a prior art search or a market analysis is one thing, and a marketing prospectus is another, and the office now gets both from the same disclosure.
The surprise has been on the faculty side. Researchers with little commercial experience are getting invention disclosures back that describe the commercial aspects of their work in the right language, and the language has been more accurate than she expected. They like it as much as she does.
- A year's worth of disclosures taken in during the first four months
- Intake interview to written assessment within 48 hours
- One-person office at a university whose research funding doubled in a year
My faculty members like it as much as I do. Putting a quality disclosure together that talks about the commercial aspects of their technology, in that language, and the language has been surprisingly accurate. That's been a real game changer.