“Technology transfer” is not so obvious an idea as it may seem. There’s technology transfer from developed nations to “developing” nations. There’s technology transfer from one industry to another. There’s technology transfer from applications in the military to civilian uses. There’s technology transfer from lab to manufacturing and from lab to other labs. There’s even technology transfer from universities to patent licensing firms–as Research Corporation used the term. Despite all these various usages, let’s ask what is involved in effective university technology transfer.
Here’s a decent working definition of technology transfer from a Senate subcommittee report from 1968: “the conscious process by which new knowledge is made available to others than those who generated it” (The Prospects for Technology Transfer: Report of the Subcommittee on Science and Technology to the Select Committee on Small Business United States Senate). Notice that this definition ends with “made available” rather than with “is adopted and used.” It’s one thing to advertise “new knowledge” and it is quite another to find people who have a use for that new knowledge and go on to use it. So we can push this definition a bit to include a better endpoint–when a technology is transferred, it is used by those obtaining it. We can also push on the idea of “process”–there’s no reason why technology transfer must involve a process. Sure, we can limit transfer to “conscious” (as distinct from unconscious, or more seriously, from accidental or spontaneous transfer) but “process” is also too limiting, too happily bureaucratic. We might say, then, that technology transfer is “an intentional activity by which new knowledge is made available to others than those who generated it and is adopted and used by those others.”
We should also ask what is involved in “new knowledge.” How long is new knowledge new? Does it matter? If you “generate” new knowledge today, and someone shows up needing that new knowledge next year, is it still new knowledge? If it is new knowledge to the receiving party, isn’t that enough? Consider, for instance, Everett Rogers’s definition of “innovation”–something perceived as new by an adopting group. For that matter, then, why should technology transfer be restricted to “those who generated it”? Does that mean that inventors must transfer their inventions, and if university patent administrators attempt to do so, that’s not technology transfer because the administrators clearly are not the ones “generating” the “new knowledge”? How about if the administrators transfer rights to a research foundation? The foundation clearly didn’t “generate” the “new knowledge.” You would think that a more workable definition of technology transfer would be the movement of “knowledge” from people who know it to people who don’t know it but use it when they get it. If they don’t use it, then we just have teaching of knowledge–all very well and good, like the crap Paul Simon learned back in high school or what James Taylor can’t remember much of at all. Continue reading