University technology transfer methods are ready to meet the Long Tail. What’s the Long Tail? It’s a concept borrowed from statistics; if you imagine a bar chart with a few tall bars followed by a slow curve downwards, that’s a long tail curve. A bar chart that ranks sales of book titles at amazon.com, for instance, displays a classic long tail pattern: a few books sell a lot (the long bars) and a lot of books sell fewer copies (the gradual curve downwards). However, if you add up sales revenue from the more esoteric (i.e. not the New York Times bestsellers) books, their combined total revenue equal a pretty good chunk of income, almost as much as the revenue from the big best sellers.
Back when I worked in a tech transfer office at a large research university, I wanted to see which of our technologies were the ” greatest hits” on our web search engine and which ones were less popular. Using the number of page views per technology from our web analytics tool, I ranked the popularity of the inventions.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Moving away from Bricks-and-Mortar Tech Transfer | BFW News
Author: Melba Kurman
