Technology transfer historically comes in three flavors.
(1) From developed countries to developing countries–which these days means from India and China to California and Michigan. This work involves adapting technology, providing infrastructure, and training people to use the technology. For IP, a signal issue is territory.
(2) From one industry to another. This involves gaining access to new markets, adapting and certifying the technology for new uses, and dealing with field of use issues. Thin film technologies that were developed for photography are now finding their way into areas like solar panels.
(3) From research to practical application. This involves bench to bedside thinking in medicine, but the immediate roots of this work are in the great industry laboratories of last century created by Bell, Edison, Westinghouse, Sarnoff, and others. The typical route was from the industry lab to the host company’s products. Another route was from independent inventors to companies looking to expand their operations quickly. Universities typically enter technology transfer focused on aspects of this third flavor.
We will explore how all this comes together in a series of posts. We will examine what it means to transfer, where that transfer takes place, and what roles universities can and should be playing, and how the current line of development of university patent licensing represents a particularly narrow bit of the range that creative class research culture really needs.