John Fraser

President, Burnside Development & Associates (BDA), John’s personal consulting business focused on academic technology transfer commercialization, and start-up formation/financing.

Current clients are in Chile (universities), China (International Technology Transfer Network), Philippines (USAID), Serbia (member of technology transfer team at the Innovation Fund World Bank/EU financed) and Geneva (WIPO, teaching academic technology transfer in 7 SE Asia countries) and as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, Washington DC..

John retired from Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida as Assistant VP for Research & Economic Development in December 2014.

Prior to FSU, he served as: Executive Vice President and co-founder of UTC, Inc., a venture capital backed, North Carolina-based university licensing/technology transfer firm; Vice President of TDC, Inc., a Toronto and Vancouver-based venture capital investment firm. He has co-founded 3 companies, assisted entrepreneurs to launch another 40+ university technology-based firms and created or headed 4 university technology commercialization organizations – 2 in the US, 2 in Canada, 2 for–profit and 2 not-for-profit.

In 2006, he served as elected President and Chair of the AUTM Board, the global association of academic technology transfer professionals. In 2020 awarded AUTM’s highest annual award – the Bayh-Dole Award in recognition of outstanding service to academic technology transfer community globally.

John holds a master’s degree in Biochemistry from the University of California – Berkeley.
He has experience over many years assisting researchers, entrepreneurs and institutions in different countries in product definition, based on market needs; business model and commercialization strategy formulation and implementation; preliminary market assessment, and raising the needed finances from government and private sources to fuel successful commercialization. Given extensive training courses globally on Entrepreneurship, Start-Up companies and academic Licensing.
He is very familiar with working in environments which are not resource rich and still growing their innovation eco-systems.