More than $150 billion in federal funding is invested in R&D annually in the United States. A key question is whether or not we are getting the maximum return on that investment.
Right now, the answer is that we could do better (1). Although technology transfer from 1996 to 2013 has contributed $518 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product and $1.1 trillion to the U.S. gross industrial output—with an impact of producing 3.8 million jobs for the U.S. economy(2)—there are still many promising new technologies in government and university laboratories with no clear path to commercialization.
