Last spring, the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council issued an RFI to collect feedback about university commercialization, including recommendations for more effective models, descriptions of current best practices and better metrics to gauge success. Apparently they’ve been reading the responses and may release a summary of the responses publicly. Federal policy makers should continue in this vein and fund a series of small-scale, test pilot programs to test out people’s suggestions.
Finding effective policy for an enterprise as vast as that of university technology development is difficult. Particularly since the massive university/industry/government ecosystem won’t reflect the impact of change for years and years to come (in other words, “turning the battleship” takes time, patience and a lot of resources). Small scale, government-funded pilot programs would be cheap, yield fast results and enable a lot of different tech transfer models to be tested. Successful funding recipients (hopefully tech transfer practitioners would be encouraged to participate in this) would propose tech transfer pilot programs that are novel and can be quickly implemented and later scaled up.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Turning the battleship with small-scale, high risk, high reward pilot programs « Triple Helix Innovation
