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How much is that Gizmo in the window? Online technology transfer and commercialization resources.

Article Excerpt
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COMMERCIAL, nonprofit, and government organizations are all in the business of using innovative technologies in products and services that are designed to benefit citizens, soldiers, customers, shareholders, and other stakeholders.

Broadly defined, technology falls into four categories:

1. Know-how: knowledge or experience allowing effective and economical use of technological products, processes, or tools

2. Process: a way of doing things, making things, or controlling a manufacturing activity

3. Product: an actual thing to be manufactured, used, or consumed

4. Tools: those things needed to make products or implement a process

Organizations that own technologies sometimes seek to license, sell, or even give them away in return for economic and social benefits. At the same time, other organizations need to find and acquire these technologies in order to provide new and useful products and services--for similar social and economic rewards.

Technology transfer describes the process by which technologies are moved from one organization to another. Technology commercialization refers to the process of defining uses and markets for a new technology and then designing a strategy for moving that technology into the marketplace. (These concepts overlap to a degree; for the purposes of this article, I refer to them collectively as technology transfer and commercialization.)

What has contributed to this trend? Global competition, faster product development cycles, and tight in-house R&D budgets are pushing companies to acquire and leverage technologies from government organizations, nonprofits, and other companies. On the other side of the equation, commercial, nonprofit, and government laboratories want to push their innovations to wider audiences, to share recognition and financial rewards with their researchers, and to contribute to their institutional bottom lines.

In the U.S., the Bayh-Dole Act (P.L. 96-517, Patent and Trademark Act Amendments of 1980) enabled small businesses and nonprofits (including universities) to retain title to inventions made under federally funded research programs. To further support small business development and technology innovation, the U.S. Small Business Administration created the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Program, which mandates that a percentage of federal R&D dollars be set aside for small business competition. The SBIR Program (www.sba.gov/sbir) requires that a company include at least a preliminary plan showing how it will commercialize the technologies arising out of the research project.

Technology transfer and commercialization require a mix of technical, engineering, legal, market, and financial skills to find, assess, and exploit technology opportunities. Important steps in these...