A New Technology Transfer Paradigm: How State Universities Can Collaborate with Industry in the USA

2008 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 99-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Renault ◽  
Jeff Cope ◽  
Molly Dix ◽  
Karen Hersey

In some US states, policy makers, pressed by local and regional industrial interests, are debating how to ‘reform’ technology transfer at public universities. ‘Reform’ in this context is generally understood to mean redirecting university technology transfer activities to increase the benefits of state-funded research to local industries. Progress towards this goal is often constrained by federally mandated laws applicable to technology transfer at universities (such as the Bayh–Dole Act) and by university policies that have been placed by state legislatures outside the purview of policy making state officials. Calls for change have also been countered by the view of many universities that the system is not broken. Suggested reforms range from the abolition of the Bayh–Dole Act, which gives universities the flexibility to transfer ownership of federally funded inventions to local industries, to structural or management changes in universities that will promote innovation and/or expedite the licensing of new ideas. This article proposes a new paradigm: instead of measuring the success of technology transfer by counting numbers of patents and licensing deals, the authors suggest measuring knowledge flows between state universities and their localities. This approach should produce a more accurate picture of the full impact of universities on their regions.

Author(s):  
Gary W. Anderson ◽  
Anthony Breitzman

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) mission is to “promote U.S. innovation and industrial competitiveness.” To meet this mission, NIST scientists produce a great variety of scientific and technical outputs. This paper presents results from a novel effort to measure usage and impact of a more complete set of outputs, including patents, publications, research data, software, reference materials, and a variety of additional formal and informal scientific outputs. This effort captures a significantly broader set of scientific outputs than traditional citation analysis which typically examines patent-to-patent citations or more recently patent-to-(peer-reviewed) paper citations. This may be of significant importance to NIST as NIST scientists produce a wide variety of scientific and technical outputs beyond patents and papers. Our results indicate that metrics that solely rely on patents issued to NIST inventors understate NIST’s true impact on invention and do not capture usage of much of NIST’s scientific output by other inventors. Thus, identifying the magnitude and varied usage of different types of NIST outputs represents a significant improvement in NIST impact metrics. The results clearly indicate that different companies, industries and technologies rely on different types of NIST outputs. Therefore, reliance on a limited set of technology transfer tools by either researchers or policy makers creates a risk that NIST knowledge and capabilities will not be transferred to and adopted by businesses and other organizations. Finally, the data developed here suggest a number of new technology transfer metrics that promote shared technology transfer responsibilities and may focus attention on activities that increase the impact of current research without fundamentally altering the infrastructural character of this research.


2012 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 287-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Ulhøi ◽  
Helle Neergaard ◽  
Toke Bjerregaard

Using theory on technology transfer and on trust and an in-depth study of nine university departments and nineteen science-based small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the authors explore the nature and direction of knowledge flows during university–industry R&D collaboration. More specifically, they examine the nature and direction of R&D technological knowledge transfer in collaborations between universities and science-based SMEs and the primary mechanisms regulating such collaborations. The findings suggest that these collaborations are highly recursive processes of technological knowledge exchange, the innovative outcome of which is greater than the sum of the activities of the respective partners during the period concerned. Surprisingly, given the highly strategic nature of the R&D activities, the collaborations were largely regulated by non-contractual measures (trust). The authors discuss the implications of their findings for R&D managers, policy makers and future studies.


2003 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Majoros

The study introduces a Hungarian economic thinker, István Varga*, whose valuable activity has remained unexplored up to now. He became an economic thinker during the 1920s, in a country that had not long before become independent of Austria. The role played by Austria in the modern economic thinking of that time was a form of competition with the thought adhered to by the UK and the USA. Hungarian economists mainly interpreted and commented on German and Austrian theories, reasons for this being that, for example, the majority of Hungarian economists had studied at German and Austrian universities, while at Hungarian universities principally German and Austrian economic theories were taught. István Varga was familiar not only with contemporary German economics but with the new ideas of Anglo-Saxon economics as well — and he introduced these ideas into Hungarian economic thinking. He lived and worked in turbulent times, and historians have only been able to appreciate his activity in a limited manner. The work of this excellent economist has all but been forgotten, although he was of international stature. After a brief summary of Varga’s profile the study will demonstrate the lasting influence he has had in four areas — namely, business cycle research and national income estimations, the 1946 Hungarian stabilisation program, corporate profit, and consumption economics — and will go on to summarise his most important achievements.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ye Emma Zohner ◽  
Jeffrey S. Morris

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major health and socio-economic disruptions worldwide. Accurate investigation of emerging data is crucial to inform policy makers as they construct viral mitigation strategies. Complications such as variable testing rates and time lags in counting cases, hospitalizations and deaths make it challenging to accurately track and identify true infectious surges from available data, and requires a multi-modal approach that simultaneously considers testing, incidence, hospitalizations, and deaths. Although many websites and applications report a subset of these data, none of them provide graphical displays capable of comparing different states or countries on all these measures as well as various useful quantities derived from them. Here we introduce a freely available dynamic representation tool, COVID-TRACK, that allows the user to simultaneously assess time trends in these measures and compare various states or countries, equipping them with a tool to investigate the potential effects of the different mitigation strategies and timelines used by various jurisdictions. Findings COVID-TRACK is a Python based web-application that provides a platform for tracking testing, incidence, hospitalizations, and deaths related to COVID-19 along with various derived quantities. Our application makes the comparison across states in the USA and countries in the world easy to explore, with useful transformation options including per capita, log scale, and/or moving averages. We illustrate its use by assessing various viral trends in the USA and Europe. Conclusion The COVID-TRACK web-application is a user-friendly analytical tool to compare data and trends related to the COVID-19 pandemic across areas in the United States and worldwide. Our tracking tool provides a unique platform where trends can be monitored across geographical areas in the coming months to watch how the pandemic waxes and wanes over time at different locations around the USA and the globe.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 1858
Author(s):  
Daniel Schmitt ◽  
Chisenga Muyoya

The number of scholars working on transition concepts in the Global South is rapidly increasing. In this context, a substantial amount of research output particularly focusses on niches and how they affect transition towards sustainability in a wider framework of the multi-level-perspective. At the same time, there is a growing interest in digital technology and its effect on sustainability challenges. In this article, we combine the two fields, and by utilizing social media data, we create an innovative network science approach to analyze the production environment of digital innovations in Africa. We focus on three innovation hubs that we conceptualize as niches and innovation intermediaries that not only create communities to develop, test and implement new technology but also function as networks to discuss and form new ideas around innovations. Our key findings show how local communities are embedded in larger innovation structures. The connections between local stakeholders and global actors are predominantly created through bridge actors, who hold key positions in their communities. With tools from network science, we demonstrate that these linking elements can regulate and steer discussions and therefore, strongly influence digital niche environments. Utilizing geographical location data, we can also see that the online space of technological innovations in Africa is heavily cantered in urban areas.


Author(s):  
Roberto Ballini

The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen a phenomenal growth of the global economy and a continuous improvement of the standard of living in industrialized countries. Sustainable development has consequently become an ideal goal and, in the early 1990s, the concept of Green Chemistry was launched in the USA as a new paradigm.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 52-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin George Wynn

This article examines how technology transfer has operated in university-company projects undertaken in small to medium sized enterprises via the UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership scheme. It adopts a qualitative case study approach, focusing on three companies drawn from an initial review of fourteen technology transfer projects. This provides the foundation for the development of a model of 12 key factors that underpinned successful outcomes in these projects. The fourteen projects are reviewed in terms of their impact on either process change, service improvement or product development, drawing upon the post-project assessments of the funding body and the developed model. Findings suggest that using new technology to innovate internal processes and services is likely to prove more successful than projects focusing on new product development. The model provides an analytical framework that will be of interest and value to academics and business practitioners looking to develop university-industry partnerships involving technology change and innovation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 142-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen Maloney ◽  
Alma McCarthy

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse how firm size impacts pension workforce coverage with a particular focus on automatic enrolment (AE) to pension plans in small organisations.Design/methodology/approachThe paper examines the alignment of government AE interests with those of small employers, their employees and pension providers to better understand how firm size impacts pension workforce coverage.FindingsThe alignment of interests between stakeholders (government, pension providers, employers and employees) differs between large and small organisations, and empirical findings from large organisations cannot be assumed to apply in small organisations.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper calls attention to the need for future empirical research and identifies a number of research questions for further analysis to examine how AE impacts pension participation in small organisations and advance the field.Originality/valueThe policy of automatically enroling employees into occupational pension plans, recently legislated for all eligible workers in the UK and under consideration in the USA and Ireland, was developed from research conducted in a small number of large organisations. Pension coverage is particularly inadequate for the large number of employees working in small organisations (1–49 employees). However, little research attention has been focussed on pensions in small organisations with pension policy makers assuming that legislated AE will work as effectively in small organisations as it did in large organisations. This paper addresses this gap in the field.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susmita Chatterjee ◽  
Bibek Ray Chaudhuri ◽  
Debabrata Dutta

In this article, we look at the determinants of the new technology adoption by consumers in the case of mobile telecommunications. The dynamic nature of the telecom industry is a result of the frequent technological change. Consumers witness different technology standards in mobile communications, starting from the first generation (1G) to second generation (2G) subsequently to third (3G) and now experiencing fourth (4G) in some countries such as Norway, Sweden, South Korea, and the USA including ours. The movement from one standard to the other has been predicted to be smooth as all of them are vertical substitutes for each other. Given the various dimensions such as price, requirements, utility and so on, these technology standards are not perfect substitutes. The article investigates the prospect of a new technology standard roll out in India. A survey of 400 mobile phone customers in metro telecom circles has been carried out for this purpose. The study applies structural equation modeling (SEM) and explores the adoption intention of this new technology among the respondents. Results show that the presence of low-cost alternatives that is the availability of a lower technology standard poses a significant hurdle to the adoption of new technology services.


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