Andrea Widener has a nice two-page article entitled, "Mission Impossible: Tech Transfer" in the November 26 issue of Chemical and Engineering News. I say "nice" because whether intended or not, the use of the term "Mission Impossible" appears very appropriate.
Various government agencies spend collectively many billions of dollars each year on research grants to universities. Presumably, those research results would be of interest to industry for the development of new products or procedures to improve the public lifestyle.
President Obama has now issued a memo requesting that the federal agencies create plans to push more of those research lab results to private companies in an effort to develop commercial products. However, Congress passed a law in 1980 establishing that program. The question is then what have various presidents and the government agencies been doing on the subject for the past 32 years?
Most of Andrea's article involve statements by various government officials concerning what they had done in the past and what they are now expecting to do. One previous activity has been the licensing of government patents, but no mention is made of how any patent licensing or other technology transfer has actually led to a commercial product.
The new Presidential push will likely involve the expenditure of additional taxpayer funds, on top of the many billions already spent on the research itself. I predict that the new action will lead to nothing more than it has led to in the past 32 years, except to spend more money.
However, this new program is in effect, and we will see whether there is any practical realization in the next few years. If as I suspect, there is no new commercial product on which we can lay a finger saying that it was of original government research grant origin, then I will have been correct. Since it is likely that the government transfer program will have been effective, the conclusion must then be drawn that the original research technology was not commercializable and should not have been taxpayer supported in the first place.
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The serious failing of this policy is that it is akin to lifting yourself by your bootstraps. From your own experience, you know that to take a research finding to commercial success - that is profitability - requires a carefully coordinated effort of marketing, process development, engineering and manufacturing. Academics doing research and the bureaucrats that provide the money have little if any of these skills.
ReplyDeleteThat is not to say that academic research does not produce commercially valuable ideas. However, the mechanisms for converting those ideas into profits are in the private sector. Some time ago, I spent several years working with the Vice Chancellor of Research at the University of Illinois helping them devise a process for bringing useful ideas to commercial products and services. As a first step, we separated the licensing function from the development function. You must put the horse before the cart - development followed by licensing. Therefore, the first step is packaging an idea and showing it to private companies who might have an interest.
This process has a better chance of success if it is carried out at the university level where the ideas originate. Federal bureaucrats for all their good intentions are not well positioned.