Tech Transfer officials at the FLC annual meeting.
The FLC: Putting It All Together
June / July 2006
Volume 4 Number 3
For years, technology transfer has been one of the national laboratories' best-kept secrets. But thanks to the Federal Laboratory Consortium, the secret is steadily surfacing. The consortium—€”commonly referred to as the FLC—€”is a national network of more than 700 federal laboratories and the only forum for technology transfer that stretches across the entire federal government.
The organization, comprised of about 400 active members, acts as a clearinghouse of information for the national laboratories, informing all of them about the cutting-edge science each is doing and helping to prevent costly duplication of effort. Ed Linsenmeyer, the chairman of the FLC, recently summed it up in a letter to members: "The FLC has developed tools and services to ensure that the efforts of federal engineers and scientists are not left on a shelf."
The FLC also disseminates information about federally funded innovation in an effort to help businesses and investors decide how to put it to work in the marketplace. Created in 1974 and chartered by Congress with the Technology Transfer Act of 1986, only in the past decade has the FLC begun to fully recognize its potential.
"The FLC was set up by Congress to enable the labs to work together more effectively but it's become much more effective over the past 10 years," said Al Jordan, a member of the FLC's volunteer executive board and a tech transfer professional at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. "The FLC has become really focused on its core missions to provide training for tech transfer people."
Members of the FLC are all volunteers from government agencies or tech transfer affiliates. These people use the FLC to help get the word out about the important research and development work happening at government facilities.
FLC members stay in touch through newsletters, email forums and periodic national conferences. Just last month, more than 300 members gathered for a week in Minneapolis to talk about their work and share best practices in tech transfer.
The advent of the internet has greatly enhanced the agency's ability to fulfill its mission. The FLC's web site at www.federallabs.org makes it easy for the public to find out the latest accomplishments in tech transfer and enables people to request personalized information about tech transfer services. The FLC also produces a free monthly newsletter that reports on a host of new technologies and training events. To subscribe contact the FLC's management support office at 856-667-7727.
Jordan said computer technology and the internet has made it much easier to get the word out in a clear, concise fashion about the cutting-edge work taking place at the federal labs. "People's willingness to use computer and online technology has opened up a whole new range of possibilities to us," he said.
"Government research is incredibly broad and in many cases it's incredibly deep, as well," he added. "We're trying to consolidate information about all that and allow private entities to get in there and access it efficiently as well."
The internet also allows members of the FLC to easily share information about the research and development happening in their various government sectors, whether it's innovation in agriculture or aerospace. The internet can also be used to share tips about doing tech transfer work itself, several FLC members said. "It's a virtual professional society," said Gary Jones, a Washington, D.C. representative for the FLC and one of its few actual employees.
As the FLC's Washington liaison, Jones is responsible for executing a key part of the agency's mission: keeping track of the federal legislation affecting technology transfer work throughout the government.
For example, Jones is keenly interested in any changes to federal patent or intellectual property law, or new American competitiveness initiatives such as the PACE Act currently moving through the Senate.
However, while Jones keeps an eye on such legislation, he doesn't lobby to affect it. "We are not a lobbying organization," he said. "We're more of a monitoring and tracking organization."
John Emond, who represents the National Aeronautics and Space Administration within the FLC, said the agency not only helps bring federally funded technology to the private sector, but also to state and local governments. For example, in late May the FLC helped coordinate a job expo with the city of Rockville, Md.
The expo linked postdoctoral workers who were leaving jobs or internships at the federal government with potential full time employers in Rockville, a booming suburb of Washington, D.C. The expo was hosted by Rockville's economic development department.
"What the FLC really does is provide, both at the national regional level, is a common source of identity for people to network across," Emond said. "It's an enabler for tech transfer."
Jordan said the FLC helps connect the technology dots between federal agencies. "Without the FLC it would be difficult to get as much information as you might need about the broad spectrum of information available about technology transfer in the U.S. government," he said.
The internet might have some of the information, but not all in one place. Without it, "you'd be almost completely reliant on internet search engines, but that doesn't give you an intelligent assessment of what the resources are," Jordan said.
The FLC's budget, which hovers at about $2 million per year, is culled from a small percentage (less than one percent) of each federal agency's annual research and development budget. The Department of Commerce is in charge of allocating and monitoring the budget.
The government's technology transfer priorities shift from time to time, depending on control of Congress, who's in the White House and national priorities. For example, some members said over the past six years, there has been a heavy emphasis within the FLC on homeland security and natural disaster response.
Jordan said the FLC acts to help make government technology more responsive to the needs of the marketplace, and by extension, America.
"We're the stone that sharpens the ax," he said.
He stressed the fact that the FLC is "the only government-wide forum" for tech transfer, meaning that nowhere else do all of the technological marvels produced by the federal government come together under one umbrella. And that serves to remind people of what has been done in the name of federally funded science and what hasn't.
"If we don't retain that corporate knowledge we'll constantly be learning the same lessons generation after generation," he said.
Tom Michael reports from Washington for Innovation.
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