Fusion › Applied Skills › 05
Negotiation and Collaborative Development
Student teams build functional, balanced approaches to transactions and collaborations by doing them, under time pressure, with confidential constraints, against a team that wants something else.
Research and negotiation
Students are given the tools to identify the four corners of a deal, strategies for uncovering and cultivating the drivers behind it, and practice working as a team to develop terms that hold up.
Simulation: technology transfer
Working from simulated facts, teams structure and attempt to finalize the terms of a technology transfer agreement leading to commercialization. Each side receives confidential constraints the other cannot see.
Simulation: venture investment
Again from simulated facts, teams develop and negotiate a plausible, investible deal structure and attempt to close it.
Negotiation across disciplines fails when the parties do not share a vocabulary and each assumes its own frame is the neutral one. That is difficult to teach by description and hard to miss after ninety minutes on the wrong side of it.