- Email: [email protected]
Difficulties in Technology Transfer: A Perspective
1
The Process of Technology Transfer and Commercialization
level and cannot invest in innovation. Toward the monopoly end of the spectrum, firms generate increasing profits and could, if they so chose, deploy some of those profits to acquire or develop technology in the quest to make even more money. When the extreme is reached, however, the monopolist is so successful that it usually sees no reason to receive or develop technology with which to innovate. Although these remarks about the two extremes may be somewhat overdrawn, they do make the point that the most likely candidates to be transferees are firms in the middle of the spectrum between pure competition and monopoly. In summary, it therefore can be observed that if a technology is to be transferred, whether internally or externally, the following must be true. 9 The motives must be present in both the transferor and transferee. 9 The technology must be available; that is, the people and resources necessary to accomplish the transfer must be present to ensure successful transfer and exploitation. 9 The technology must be credible; that is, the data and information supporting the case for the technology to be transferred must be comprehensive and believable. 9 The technology must be relevant to one or more of the markets the transferee seeks to serve. 9 The price the transferee has to bear in receiving and exploiting the technology must be acceptable given the potential for profit generated by the endeavor.
Essay II
Difficulties in Technology Transfer: A Perspective E M M A N U E L P. PAPADAKIS Quality Systems Concepts, Inc., 379 Diem Woods Drive, New Holland, Pennsylvania
This essay presents the author's opinions on a few of the difficulties experienced in technology transfer. In doing so, it addresses some factors that may be causes of these difficulties. As technology transfer is a prerequisite step to commercialization, it is valuable to see the process of technology
Emmanuel R Papadakis
transfer from the perspective of different people who have had experiences with the process. Other essays treat the subjects of technology transfer and commercialization from the didactic point of view to show ways and means to accomplish the goal of commercialization. Taking all the essays in this chapter together, the reader may be able to form an opinion on viable ways to bring products to the users through the marketplace. The various types of organizations engaged in research and development experience varying degrees of difficulty in effecting technology transfer. For instance, the small company that decides to build a salable object can bring it to market relatively rapidly, provided it has the capital required. The large, vertically integrated company can do likewise. University professors seem to have the most difficulty, although they sometimes find an easier path if they happen upon an advantageous research topic. So what is the secret of finding the optimum research subject? Observing a deeply felt need on the part of a genuine potential customer may be the key. A great deal of very interesting research has neither need nor customer in this sense. (Indeed, much pure research is not intended for market.) Even when the need is there, all books on marketing point out that of the multiplicity of ideas investigated at some early stage, only a few reach the stage of commercialization. Perhaps this book can show its readers ways to maximize potentials for successful commercialization, beginning with the observation of a market need. As an example, consider Prof. Nicholas A. Milas (1896-1971)ofMIT, the organic chemist who synthesized vitamin A and vitamin D (Johnson, 1996). Milas is a "Little Immigrant" success story. Prof. Milas (shortened from Miladakis) was an immigrant boy from Greece. He obtained a 4th-grade education in Greece, received some brief tutoring in math and German in Iowa, and began his college career at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, before the United States entered World War I (Papadakis, 1977). He worked his way through, graduating Magna Cure Laude in 1922, and went on to Chicago for this Ph.D. in chemistry, after which he was given a National Research Fellowship at Princeton. Unfortunately, I do not have documentation on the method he used for technology transfer. However, his research undeniably bore the characteristic of having observed a real need with many potential customers: His synthesized molecules have found their way into almost every container of milk in the world as well as into vitamin pills. Universities experience varying degrees of difficulty in getting their research into and through the process of technology transfer. Part of the difficulty must be ascribed to the sources of the ideas being brought to the
1
The Process of Technology Transfer and Commercialization
attention of university researchers. Since this book concerns the commercialized products that originated as ideas somewhere and went through the research part of their life cycles in a university (or other) laboratory, any factor impeding the process or wasting resources calls for scrutiny. "Where ideas originate" for university professors and graduate students is likely to be from Requests for Proposals issued by the funding agencies. To some degree, discussions in meetings of the industrial consortia in Research Centers may also contribute. Professional society meetings also play a role in disseminating ideas, but not nearly the primary role they once did. Universities have been the sources of research in the scientific community ever since the Enlightenment. They have been joined more recently (in the 1850-1975 time frame) by a few great industrial and government laboratories. During and after World War II, universities were handed the responsibility of doing much of the scientific and engineering work of the United States government. Note, for instance, the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago and the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. Now universities are also being asked to take on the responsibility of doing much of the industrial R&D as many industrial firms downsize and eliminate their research capability. This means that universities are under pressure to have more of their output realized as technology transfer leading to commercialization. As companies deliberately eliminate their capabilities in certain technical areas, they must rely on supplier companies, universities, and/or the government to provide the technical know-how for their businesses to survive. The downsized companies reach a point where they are not doing the work but rather are choosing among suppliers and issuing contracts for the work to be done. The government has been doing just this for many years by closing facilities such as arsenals and shipyards while issuing more contracts to industry and universities for technology and its hardware. This leads to some degree of inadequacy in the knowledge base among funding agencies in the most knowledge-intensive field of all, R&D. Many businesses, meanwhile, try to gain economically through technology without complete internal capability by applying for benefits under the "dual-use" doctrine for military facilities, under CRADA (Cooperative Research and Development Agreement) arrangements, and under the concept of "leveraging of resources" at government-sponsored Research Centers in universities in which industrial consortia participate. Thus, university professors get a multiplicity of competing ideas. This might seem to be an advantageous new situation, but is it, the point of view of doing something relevant leading to technology transfer?
10
Emmanuel R Papadakis
As a source of ideas, government has developed a degree of variability and fluctuation over time in the recent past. Government agencies have tended to find new subjects to emphasize on a rather frequent basis. For example, extending the lifetime of the infrastructure of the nation has come up as a research initiative; in previous years the repair of the infrastructure would have been treated by an infusion of tax money through an appropriation or an expenditure of corporate funds to improve profits. Many government agencies have found it necessary to present new ideas and to change the fundamental emphases of the agencies to satisfy needs that previously would have been handled by other means. For instance, the National Science Foundation (NSF), once only handling pure graduate-level and post-doctoral research, has developed a program to help junior college students transfer into degree programs at universities. Agencies have been caught up to a greater or lesser degree in the Areopagus Syndrome, in which it is necessary to address "some new thing" just to seem relevant. Much of the emphasis in some quarters is to provide "seed money" for a short period of time rather than to decide what is really important to do and to form a commitment to do it (fund it). Thus the nation has great difficulty generating the staying power to carry through a plan worthy of attention. The university professor as a consequence is bombarded with new ideas and funding possibilities that may not last long enough for the completion of relevant research to produce candidate inventions for technology transfer. In this context the university professor must choose something relevant and important to work on, or at least something that will bring in money. Sometimes the requirements for bringing in funding are predominant. It is quite possible for a professor to propose, accept, and carry out research on a concept that his best judgment tells him will not work, although his supportive contract monitor has funding to pursue it. Untold millions of dollars are spent at universities and elsewhere on ideas that are infeasible or useless or too dangerous. A classic case of one too dangerous was the ANP (Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion) Project of the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) in which a sodium-cooled breeder reactor was to supply the heat to power the jet engines of an airplane. (Although the work was done in-house at the AEC for security reasons circa 1955, professors and even students got special "ANP" clearances on top of "Q" clearances to carry on work at AEC facilities.) After a B-25 had crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945, many people believed that having a nuclear reactor flying over populated areas would be too dangerous to contemplate. Yet money was spent on the idea.
1
The Process of Technology Transfer and Commercialization
11
An example of an infeasible idea arose at about the time of Sputnik and the Mohole. It was reported that an RFP had been issued by a defense agency for the Orbiting Mole. A tunnel was to be dug secretly around the circumference of the earth in an essentially circular ellipse. When the tunnel had been evacuated, an earth satellite was to have been set into orbit within it for surveillance purposes, i.e., spying. It was further reported that big defense contractors privy to the secret RFP rushed to quote on this project to procure defense dollars. While it is very likely that the Orbiting Mole story is somewhere between apocryphal and fantasy, I take it as a fable (like Aesop's Fables) that shows the propensity for seeking and spending money from any spigot. Much more recently, research on thick composites for submarine hulls was sponsored. Various academics worked on this research despite the fact that the builders and repairers of submarines knew that repairs to the internal mechanisms of submarines require the cutting of large sections out of the hulls. Whereas a metal hull can be welded after such repairs, there is no way (and none is envisioned at the present time) of patching such a gap in a composite hull. Hence the composite hull could not be built in the forseeable future, so the research was useless for its stated intent, namely, the hull of the next-generation manned nuclear submarine. The only possibility for technology transfer of the thick composites would be some serendipitous spin-off. It can be argued that serendipity leads to great new things. NASA argued that the space program accomplished just this in the way of "spin-offs" for the general public. It even works in reverse. For example, the background radiation from the "Big Bang" was discovered by AT&T engineers who were looking for the source of static in microwave telephone transmissions. Having difficulty heating Aunt Bertha on the telephone led to the confirmation of a scientific theory of fundamental importance ~ namely, that there is a point in time (the Big Bang) before which "before" has no meaning and "before which" scientists can measure nothing and hypothesize nothing physical. Thus serendipity is wonderful, but camouflaging the desire for it as nuclear airplanes, moon landings, or plastic submarines calls for scrutiny. The professor must look for the serendipity "in advance" if he or she is concerned with technology transfer opportunities. University professors are put in a particularly difficult position by the mixed signals they receive about what is worth working on and why it is important. First, pure science for the sake of knowledge will always be worth working on. But the output of pure science may never be commercialized and hence may never be reported in a book like this. (The closest some pure
12
Emmanuel R Papadakis
research may come to popularization is in a book such as A Brief History of Time (Hawking, 1988).) Second, in the university there is always the "publish or perish" dictum. In the minds of some professors, however, worthy ideas that may require years of work prior to publication vie for importance with other ideas that are likely to lead to salable products. It is likely that a professor will yield to the pressures to conform to academic practices and eschew practical endeavors; the dean wants papers published in high-quality journals, not practical ones. Third, once projects have been started, the professors (just as all people) are likely to become fixated on their personal ideas and not see them as impractical even if such a condition were to be pointed out. Fourth, their funding agent is not interested in sales. Fifth, the professors rarely have the ongoing, vital feedback from a customer with a real need. The funding agent may perceive a real need, but is several layers of administration removed from the real customer. By contrast, consider the millieu at a major corporation~one that I have experience with, the Ford Motor Company. The Vice President of Research was actively cognizant of the funder/customer relationship. The VP held an annual budget planning meeting to ascertain the value of research projects. He wanted to fund some and terminate others. Principal Investigators would present their work very succinctly (say, in 489 minutes) in the format of Problem/Value/Approach/Status/Plans. The Problem was the real company problem being addressed by the Investigator; the Value was the dollar figure that could be saved from costs or added to profit by solving the Problem; the Approach was Technical in a sentence or two; the Status included the percentage of completion of the R&D project; and the one-year (budget) Plans also defined the projected completion date and the probability of success. The Investigator is held to all these plans rigorously, just as the input to this little presentation had to be rigorously assembled and understood by the Investigator. (One year I had to fly home from a family vacation to give such a presentation. It was serious business.) The customer was not only the Vice President but also the Division of the Company that had the problem and had enlisted the support of Research; the investigator has plenteous feedback. Even more direct was the feedback on one development project carried out at Panametrics, Inc., a small R&D company and builder of instruments. In 1970, I proposed building a commercial Pulse-Echo Overlap ultrasonic velocity metrology instrument of great versatility and accuracy. Edmund H. Camevale, the President of Panametrics, agreed to underwrite the development expense after one copy had been sold. He put up the marketing money
1
The Process of Technology Transfer and Commercialization
13
for this attempt. The NRC (National Research Council) in Canada ordered one sight-unseen; then design and production commenced. About 15 were sold in the first three years. Other feedback is available in industry, also. In i n d u s t r y ~ a practical p l a c e ~ i d e a s that seem promising to researchers often are squelched by factory managers at the very outset so that little resource is expended upon them. One example is an X-ray system that would have been the ideal technical solution to an on-line quality monitoring problem in an automative plant. But the use of X rays was rejected because the labour union would have refused to have workers in the vicinity even with good shielding of the machine. Another example is a fluorescent additive that could have been added to oil in shock absorbers to make any leakage visible to an automatic UV camera. This idea was rejected because of the cost and delay that would have been needed to qualify the new oil mixture as noncorrosive to materials in the device. A final example is an ultrasonic device using attenuation to measure grain size that was proposed to a brass company. The company's response was that the small expense of having a person polish a small tab of the brass sheet and examine it under a microscope would render ultrasound not cost-effective. These reasons may seem crude and Philistine relative to the elegance of research, but that is the way researchers must learn to think in order to get research into production and not "spin their wheels" uselessly on never-to-be-wanted products. At AT&T (the Bell system) before the divestiture ruling, technology transfer was frequently carried out by reassigning personnel to a more advanced division as the development progressed. A scientist in research might be moved to a device development department and then to a systems integration department, and so on, until finally finding himself in the long lines department making his device fit into a system to transmit telephone calls coast-to-coast. Although this personnel transfer did not happen often as a percentage of personnel, it happened often numerically in such a large establishment. By contrast, the university professor is not moved and generally does not want to move. He or she is held to pure research by the "publish-or-perish" philosophy of academic life. He or she must "toss the research over the wall" to the next stage of development, as Deming so aptly says. It is claimed (Deming, 1982) that even in industry this "walled enclave" mentality retards progress between research, development, engineering, manufacturing planning, production, and sales. How much more is the professor hemmed in! And feedback does not come back "over the wall," either.
14
Emmanuel R Papadakis
In the context of the mixed signals coming as inputs, it is easy to see the difficulties that academics have in directing their output into the channels of technology transfer. Faced with a professor "wearing the hat" of a salesman trying to market some new invention, the industrialist occasionally makes the judgement that he or she is being presented with a "solution looking for a problem." This means that the professor was doing something interesting and publishable while being under the impression that it would also be useful. Had he been in industry, his market research department could have found out through surveys or by consulting factories whether the idea was useful. But the university system has no direct mechanism for such feedback. This is not criticism of universities--they were set up in the Middle Ages for an entirely different purpose, namely, saving and increasing knowledge while providing intellectual freedom for the professors. Few university founders (except the founders of the Colorado School of Mines in 1874 and the builders of the new MIT campus in 1916) ever envisioned government and industry being so dependent on the university nor, indeed, the university being so dependent on government and industry. So, in this book, the items being reported have run the gauntlet from the idea phase through research, development, technology transfer, and commercialization into use. Many ideas have dropped by the wayside, being overwhelmed by negatives. This book reports on successes without any pejorative opinions about the ideas that have been rejected at any stage. And, as mentioned earlier, completeness of coverage is not claimed. REFERENCES Deming, W. Edwards (1982). "Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position." Center for Advanced Engineering Studies, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hawking, Stephen W. (1988). "A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes." Bantam Books, New York. Johnson, Jean (1996). Private communication, Alumni Director, Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Information in Coe tracking system for alumni. Dr. Nicholas A. Milas was awarded his B.S. there in 1922. Papadakis, Philippos E. (1977). Private communication.
The Process of Technology Transfer and Commercialization
level and cannot invest in innovation. Toward the monopoly end of the spectrum, firms generate increasing profits and could, if they so chose, deploy some of those profits to acquire or develop technology in the quest to make even more money. When the extreme is reached, however, the monopolist is so successful that it usually sees no reason to receive or develop technology with which to innovate. Although these remarks about the two extremes may be somewhat overdrawn, they do make the point that the most likely candidates to be transferees are firms in the middle of the spectrum between pure competition and monopoly. In summary, it therefore can be observed that if a technology is to be transferred, whether internally or externally, the following must be true. 9 The motives must be present in both the transferor and transferee. 9 The technology must be available; that is, the people and resources necessary to accomplish the transfer must be present to ensure successful transfer and exploitation. 9 The technology must be credible; that is, the data and information supporting the case for the technology to be transferred must be comprehensive and believable. 9 The technology must be relevant to one or more of the markets the transferee seeks to serve. 9 The price the transferee has to bear in receiving and exploiting the technology must be acceptable given the potential for profit generated by the endeavor.
Essay II
Difficulties in Technology Transfer: A Perspective E M M A N U E L P. PAPADAKIS Quality Systems Concepts, Inc., 379 Diem Woods Drive, New Holland, Pennsylvania
This essay presents the author's opinions on a few of the difficulties experienced in technology transfer. In doing so, it addresses some factors that may be causes of these difficulties. As technology transfer is a prerequisite step to commercialization, it is valuable to see the process of technology
Emmanuel R Papadakis
transfer from the perspective of different people who have had experiences with the process. Other essays treat the subjects of technology transfer and commercialization from the didactic point of view to show ways and means to accomplish the goal of commercialization. Taking all the essays in this chapter together, the reader may be able to form an opinion on viable ways to bring products to the users through the marketplace. The various types of organizations engaged in research and development experience varying degrees of difficulty in effecting technology transfer. For instance, the small company that decides to build a salable object can bring it to market relatively rapidly, provided it has the capital required. The large, vertically integrated company can do likewise. University professors seem to have the most difficulty, although they sometimes find an easier path if they happen upon an advantageous research topic. So what is the secret of finding the optimum research subject? Observing a deeply felt need on the part of a genuine potential customer may be the key. A great deal of very interesting research has neither need nor customer in this sense. (Indeed, much pure research is not intended for market.) Even when the need is there, all books on marketing point out that of the multiplicity of ideas investigated at some early stage, only a few reach the stage of commercialization. Perhaps this book can show its readers ways to maximize potentials for successful commercialization, beginning with the observation of a market need. As an example, consider Prof. Nicholas A. Milas (1896-1971)ofMIT, the organic chemist who synthesized vitamin A and vitamin D (Johnson, 1996). Milas is a "Little Immigrant" success story. Prof. Milas (shortened from Miladakis) was an immigrant boy from Greece. He obtained a 4th-grade education in Greece, received some brief tutoring in math and German in Iowa, and began his college career at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, before the United States entered World War I (Papadakis, 1977). He worked his way through, graduating Magna Cure Laude in 1922, and went on to Chicago for this Ph.D. in chemistry, after which he was given a National Research Fellowship at Princeton. Unfortunately, I do not have documentation on the method he used for technology transfer. However, his research undeniably bore the characteristic of having observed a real need with many potential customers: His synthesized molecules have found their way into almost every container of milk in the world as well as into vitamin pills. Universities experience varying degrees of difficulty in getting their research into and through the process of technology transfer. Part of the difficulty must be ascribed to the sources of the ideas being brought to the
1
The Process of Technology Transfer and Commercialization
attention of university researchers. Since this book concerns the commercialized products that originated as ideas somewhere and went through the research part of their life cycles in a university (or other) laboratory, any factor impeding the process or wasting resources calls for scrutiny. "Where ideas originate" for university professors and graduate students is likely to be from Requests for Proposals issued by the funding agencies. To some degree, discussions in meetings of the industrial consortia in Research Centers may also contribute. Professional society meetings also play a role in disseminating ideas, but not nearly the primary role they once did. Universities have been the sources of research in the scientific community ever since the Enlightenment. They have been joined more recently (in the 1850-1975 time frame) by a few great industrial and government laboratories. During and after World War II, universities were handed the responsibility of doing much of the scientific and engineering work of the United States government. Note, for instance, the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago and the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. Now universities are also being asked to take on the responsibility of doing much of the industrial R&D as many industrial firms downsize and eliminate their research capability. This means that universities are under pressure to have more of their output realized as technology transfer leading to commercialization. As companies deliberately eliminate their capabilities in certain technical areas, they must rely on supplier companies, universities, and/or the government to provide the technical know-how for their businesses to survive. The downsized companies reach a point where they are not doing the work but rather are choosing among suppliers and issuing contracts for the work to be done. The government has been doing just this for many years by closing facilities such as arsenals and shipyards while issuing more contracts to industry and universities for technology and its hardware. This leads to some degree of inadequacy in the knowledge base among funding agencies in the most knowledge-intensive field of all, R&D. Many businesses, meanwhile, try to gain economically through technology without complete internal capability by applying for benefits under the "dual-use" doctrine for military facilities, under CRADA (Cooperative Research and Development Agreement) arrangements, and under the concept of "leveraging of resources" at government-sponsored Research Centers in universities in which industrial consortia participate. Thus, university professors get a multiplicity of competing ideas. This might seem to be an advantageous new situation, but is it, the point of view of doing something relevant leading to technology transfer?
10
Emmanuel R Papadakis
As a source of ideas, government has developed a degree of variability and fluctuation over time in the recent past. Government agencies have tended to find new subjects to emphasize on a rather frequent basis. For example, extending the lifetime of the infrastructure of the nation has come up as a research initiative; in previous years the repair of the infrastructure would have been treated by an infusion of tax money through an appropriation or an expenditure of corporate funds to improve profits. Many government agencies have found it necessary to present new ideas and to change the fundamental emphases of the agencies to satisfy needs that previously would have been handled by other means. For instance, the National Science Foundation (NSF), once only handling pure graduate-level and post-doctoral research, has developed a program to help junior college students transfer into degree programs at universities. Agencies have been caught up to a greater or lesser degree in the Areopagus Syndrome, in which it is necessary to address "some new thing" just to seem relevant. Much of the emphasis in some quarters is to provide "seed money" for a short period of time rather than to decide what is really important to do and to form a commitment to do it (fund it). Thus the nation has great difficulty generating the staying power to carry through a plan worthy of attention. The university professor as a consequence is bombarded with new ideas and funding possibilities that may not last long enough for the completion of relevant research to produce candidate inventions for technology transfer. In this context the university professor must choose something relevant and important to work on, or at least something that will bring in money. Sometimes the requirements for bringing in funding are predominant. It is quite possible for a professor to propose, accept, and carry out research on a concept that his best judgment tells him will not work, although his supportive contract monitor has funding to pursue it. Untold millions of dollars are spent at universities and elsewhere on ideas that are infeasible or useless or too dangerous. A classic case of one too dangerous was the ANP (Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion) Project of the AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) in which a sodium-cooled breeder reactor was to supply the heat to power the jet engines of an airplane. (Although the work was done in-house at the AEC for security reasons circa 1955, professors and even students got special "ANP" clearances on top of "Q" clearances to carry on work at AEC facilities.) After a B-25 had crashed into the Empire State Building in 1945, many people believed that having a nuclear reactor flying over populated areas would be too dangerous to contemplate. Yet money was spent on the idea.
1
The Process of Technology Transfer and Commercialization
11
An example of an infeasible idea arose at about the time of Sputnik and the Mohole. It was reported that an RFP had been issued by a defense agency for the Orbiting Mole. A tunnel was to be dug secretly around the circumference of the earth in an essentially circular ellipse. When the tunnel had been evacuated, an earth satellite was to have been set into orbit within it for surveillance purposes, i.e., spying. It was further reported that big defense contractors privy to the secret RFP rushed to quote on this project to procure defense dollars. While it is very likely that the Orbiting Mole story is somewhere between apocryphal and fantasy, I take it as a fable (like Aesop's Fables) that shows the propensity for seeking and spending money from any spigot. Much more recently, research on thick composites for submarine hulls was sponsored. Various academics worked on this research despite the fact that the builders and repairers of submarines knew that repairs to the internal mechanisms of submarines require the cutting of large sections out of the hulls. Whereas a metal hull can be welded after such repairs, there is no way (and none is envisioned at the present time) of patching such a gap in a composite hull. Hence the composite hull could not be built in the forseeable future, so the research was useless for its stated intent, namely, the hull of the next-generation manned nuclear submarine. The only possibility for technology transfer of the thick composites would be some serendipitous spin-off. It can be argued that serendipity leads to great new things. NASA argued that the space program accomplished just this in the way of "spin-offs" for the general public. It even works in reverse. For example, the background radiation from the "Big Bang" was discovered by AT&T engineers who were looking for the source of static in microwave telephone transmissions. Having difficulty heating Aunt Bertha on the telephone led to the confirmation of a scientific theory of fundamental importance ~ namely, that there is a point in time (the Big Bang) before which "before" has no meaning and "before which" scientists can measure nothing and hypothesize nothing physical. Thus serendipity is wonderful, but camouflaging the desire for it as nuclear airplanes, moon landings, or plastic submarines calls for scrutiny. The professor must look for the serendipity "in advance" if he or she is concerned with technology transfer opportunities. University professors are put in a particularly difficult position by the mixed signals they receive about what is worth working on and why it is important. First, pure science for the sake of knowledge will always be worth working on. But the output of pure science may never be commercialized and hence may never be reported in a book like this. (The closest some pure
12
Emmanuel R Papadakis
research may come to popularization is in a book such as A Brief History of Time (Hawking, 1988).) Second, in the university there is always the "publish or perish" dictum. In the minds of some professors, however, worthy ideas that may require years of work prior to publication vie for importance with other ideas that are likely to lead to salable products. It is likely that a professor will yield to the pressures to conform to academic practices and eschew practical endeavors; the dean wants papers published in high-quality journals, not practical ones. Third, once projects have been started, the professors (just as all people) are likely to become fixated on their personal ideas and not see them as impractical even if such a condition were to be pointed out. Fourth, their funding agent is not interested in sales. Fifth, the professors rarely have the ongoing, vital feedback from a customer with a real need. The funding agent may perceive a real need, but is several layers of administration removed from the real customer. By contrast, consider the millieu at a major corporation~one that I have experience with, the Ford Motor Company. The Vice President of Research was actively cognizant of the funder/customer relationship. The VP held an annual budget planning meeting to ascertain the value of research projects. He wanted to fund some and terminate others. Principal Investigators would present their work very succinctly (say, in 489 minutes) in the format of Problem/Value/Approach/Status/Plans. The Problem was the real company problem being addressed by the Investigator; the Value was the dollar figure that could be saved from costs or added to profit by solving the Problem; the Approach was Technical in a sentence or two; the Status included the percentage of completion of the R&D project; and the one-year (budget) Plans also defined the projected completion date and the probability of success. The Investigator is held to all these plans rigorously, just as the input to this little presentation had to be rigorously assembled and understood by the Investigator. (One year I had to fly home from a family vacation to give such a presentation. It was serious business.) The customer was not only the Vice President but also the Division of the Company that had the problem and had enlisted the support of Research; the investigator has plenteous feedback. Even more direct was the feedback on one development project carried out at Panametrics, Inc., a small R&D company and builder of instruments. In 1970, I proposed building a commercial Pulse-Echo Overlap ultrasonic velocity metrology instrument of great versatility and accuracy. Edmund H. Camevale, the President of Panametrics, agreed to underwrite the development expense after one copy had been sold. He put up the marketing money
1
The Process of Technology Transfer and Commercialization
13
for this attempt. The NRC (National Research Council) in Canada ordered one sight-unseen; then design and production commenced. About 15 were sold in the first three years. Other feedback is available in industry, also. In i n d u s t r y ~ a practical p l a c e ~ i d e a s that seem promising to researchers often are squelched by factory managers at the very outset so that little resource is expended upon them. One example is an X-ray system that would have been the ideal technical solution to an on-line quality monitoring problem in an automative plant. But the use of X rays was rejected because the labour union would have refused to have workers in the vicinity even with good shielding of the machine. Another example is a fluorescent additive that could have been added to oil in shock absorbers to make any leakage visible to an automatic UV camera. This idea was rejected because of the cost and delay that would have been needed to qualify the new oil mixture as noncorrosive to materials in the device. A final example is an ultrasonic device using attenuation to measure grain size that was proposed to a brass company. The company's response was that the small expense of having a person polish a small tab of the brass sheet and examine it under a microscope would render ultrasound not cost-effective. These reasons may seem crude and Philistine relative to the elegance of research, but that is the way researchers must learn to think in order to get research into production and not "spin their wheels" uselessly on never-to-be-wanted products. At AT&T (the Bell system) before the divestiture ruling, technology transfer was frequently carried out by reassigning personnel to a more advanced division as the development progressed. A scientist in research might be moved to a device development department and then to a systems integration department, and so on, until finally finding himself in the long lines department making his device fit into a system to transmit telephone calls coast-to-coast. Although this personnel transfer did not happen often as a percentage of personnel, it happened often numerically in such a large establishment. By contrast, the university professor is not moved and generally does not want to move. He or she is held to pure research by the "publish-or-perish" philosophy of academic life. He or she must "toss the research over the wall" to the next stage of development, as Deming so aptly says. It is claimed (Deming, 1982) that even in industry this "walled enclave" mentality retards progress between research, development, engineering, manufacturing planning, production, and sales. How much more is the professor hemmed in! And feedback does not come back "over the wall," either.
14
Emmanuel R Papadakis
In the context of the mixed signals coming as inputs, it is easy to see the difficulties that academics have in directing their output into the channels of technology transfer. Faced with a professor "wearing the hat" of a salesman trying to market some new invention, the industrialist occasionally makes the judgement that he or she is being presented with a "solution looking for a problem." This means that the professor was doing something interesting and publishable while being under the impression that it would also be useful. Had he been in industry, his market research department could have found out through surveys or by consulting factories whether the idea was useful. But the university system has no direct mechanism for such feedback. This is not criticism of universities--they were set up in the Middle Ages for an entirely different purpose, namely, saving and increasing knowledge while providing intellectual freedom for the professors. Few university founders (except the founders of the Colorado School of Mines in 1874 and the builders of the new MIT campus in 1916) ever envisioned government and industry being so dependent on the university nor, indeed, the university being so dependent on government and industry. So, in this book, the items being reported have run the gauntlet from the idea phase through research, development, technology transfer, and commercialization into use. Many ideas have dropped by the wayside, being overwhelmed by negatives. This book reports on successes without any pejorative opinions about the ideas that have been rejected at any stage. And, as mentioned earlier, completeness of coverage is not claimed. REFERENCES Deming, W. Edwards (1982). "Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position." Center for Advanced Engineering Studies, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hawking, Stephen W. (1988). "A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes." Bantam Books, New York. Johnson, Jean (1996). Private communication, Alumni Director, Coe College, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Information in Coe tracking system for alumni. Dr. Nicholas A. Milas was awarded his B.S. there in 1922. Papadakis, Philippos E. (1977). Private communication.