Royalty Stacks: Turning Tech Transfer Into a Strategy Game with Guru Venkatesan
About this episode
This episode features Guru Venkatesan discussing his board game Royalty Stacks, which illustrates the complexities of technology transfer.
Technology transfer is often described through patents, licenses, startups, and commercialization strategy, but rarely through the lens of a board game. In this episode of AUTM on the Air, we talk with Guru Venkatesan, a business development manager at Fred Hutch and the creator of Royalty Stacks, a tech-transfer-inspired game built around patents, licenses, and leverage. The game gives players a chance to take ideas, decide how broadly to protect them, and choose whether to bring them to market through startups, exclusive licenses, or non-exclusive partnerships, all while navigating knock-offs, hostile takeovers, shifting market conditions, and the occasional boost from a rich uncle’s seed fund. Guru’s own path into technology commercialization has been anything but linear. He grew up in a small town in India with an early interest in visual arts, but after a classic family plot twist, he studied engineering instead. He earned his bachelor’s degree in India, moved to Tennessee for a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, and later founded Tech Carnivol, a Coachella-style festival for science and engineering during graduate school. His introduction to technology commercialization came at…
Topics covered
- technology transfer
- board games
- patents
- commercialization
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