Fusion — Applied Skills — 04
Transaction Design and Execution
Analysis only matters if something moves. Transaction design is where a commercial thesis becomes an instrument someone can sign.
Students are introduced to the high-level transactional forms that typically underlie development and commercialization — and, more importantly, to the reasoning that determines which form fits a given technology at a given stage.
Identifying the key drivers and requirements for a functional transaction across three settings: technology licensing, collaborative development, and financial investment. Each distributes control, capital, and risk differently, and each fails in a different way when the terms are wrong.
The skill is exercised directly in the fall licensing simulation, where teams split into university and company sides and must reach an agreement under genuinely conflicting constraints, and again in the spring investment simulation. It is also the explicit subject of EPOM 412, which examines sponsored research, licensing, and startup formation as alternative routes out of the lab.