Tech Transfer to Unlock University Innovation

Every day, academics around the world are pouring over research into new technologies with the potential to change the world, yet much of that research never makes it out of the lab. A new project of the National Science Foundation wants to make sure that the best ideas make it out to the world.

A huge amount of technological innovation starts in universities -- from information technology to biotechnology to nanofabrication and beyond. As part of their academic mission, universities give professors and their research teams the freedom to experiment. In this way, they support the innovation process long before even a business incubator would.

But while there is an academic motivation for supporting research, for many institutions there is also a commercial motivation. Universities usually have partial ownership of technologies developed in house, and that can lead to extremely lucrative "technology transfers" where the university sells part or all of it's rights to a technology to an external actor. Those transfers pay for everything from new buildings to financial aid.

An article in the New York Times last weekend profiled the rise of a new type of institution on university campuses known as "Proof-of-concept" centers that help academics with promising ideas connect with external actors and investors in order to ensure that the most promising ideas actually see the light of day.

One of the problems, however, is that most universities aren't well-equipped to deal with tech transfers. Outside of major research centers like MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, tech transfer offices are understaffed and often over their heads when it comes to the complexity of expediently negotiating deals.

A $12 million budget request through the National Science Foundation's Partnerships for Innovation program would do an experiment to help a cross-university consortium establish a more effective technology transfer system. The logic is that innovation is coming from ever more diverse centers, and expanding the infrastructure to unlock that innovation ultimately results in more benefit for society as a whole.

I'm all for this plan. It might not work, but I do think that the government enabling the infrastructure for innovation is more promising than them seeding and funding it directly.

Read more about technology transfers and university innovation in this New York Times piece.

Photo credit: U.S. Army Environmental Command