TechMaker portal

Teaching Tech Transfer Online

June / July 2010 By: Megan Fleming Volume 8 Number 3

Print this Article

E-mail this Article

In most states, breakthrough technologies are in development in the labs of startups, on workbenches at government laboratories and in the minds of innovators and entrepreneurs. At the same time, however, it’s been said that states are like bakers who have all the equipment and ingredients to bake a cake, but rarely make one. In short: lots of potential, little follow-through.

Admittedly, the process of moving new technology from the lab to the marketplace is no easy task.
It requires a depth of understanding about a complex range of factors from finance and marketing to prototyping and risk, a body of knowledge that hasn’t been easily accessible—until now.

TechMaker, an innovation designed for innovators, consolidates the steps and resources required for successful tech transfer into a dynamic, interactive curriculum. The flexible online educational program is comprised of maps and resources that educators from high school teachers to university professors can use to teach the tech transfer process to students interested in commercializing new technologies.

“We’re enabling innovation by giving people the tools to understand the tech transfer process. TechMaker will help decide if you should commercialize your technology, because all technology may be matured, but not all technology should be commercialized,” says Dominique Foley Wilson, principal at RandomBusinessServices, one of two companies developing TechMaker. The company offers project and program management services to a diverse clientele. Foley Wilson is an internationally recognized expert in workforce development and critical skills development programs.

The second company involved with TechMaker, BehaveHeuristics, is a group of knowledge engineers who collect, analyze and organize information in strategic ways to help others maximize its use. “We elicit knowledge from subject matter experts then shape it into an educational learning format,” says Kim Grady, president.

TechMaker is the result of a Workforce Innovation in Regional Economic Development (WIRED) grant, a three-year, $5 million grant awarded to the state of New Mexico by the U. S. Department of Labor. The grant funds initiatives to build workforce capacity and foster economic transformation at a regional level in six key technology industries: renewable energy, green building construction, microelectronics, optics, aerospace/aviation and advanced manufacturing.  WIRED project goals include creating green manufacturing jobs, expanding the pipeline of green-tech talent and developing the entrepreneurial and innovative capacity of the region around green technology. TechMaker helps fulfill the third goal.

Foley Wilson and Grady began developing TechMaker in the spring of 2009. “We were asked to map the skills required to mature and commercialize technology,” Foley Wilson says. “As we started looking into it we recognized that it had never been done. So not only were we fulfilling an important component of the grant, we were also breaking new ground and building new partnerships.”

The team started by gathering experts from the targeted WIRED industries, as well as specialists in education, entrepreneurship and technology maturation for an input workshop. The group included Steve Walsh, a serial entrepreneur and professor at the University of New Mexico Anderson School of Management; Van Romero, vice president of research and economic development at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology; Randy Grissom, director of the Santa Fe Community College Sustainable Technologies Center; Erin Beaumont, innovation associate at University of New Mexico’s Science and Technology Corp.; and Luisa Casso, vice president of economic development at SunCal.

Grady led the group in an information engineering exercise called “knowledge mapping” where they identified the different steps and pieces of information required for successful tech transfer. Then she took the exercise further, challenging them to not only capture each element in the process but to also define the relationship between the elements.  “I developed this technique because I work with a lot of new and emerging technologies, things that people don’t know a lot about and where there isn’t much educational material available yet,” says Grady.

Grady consolidated and organized the input from the workshop to create three high-level maps representing the three main stages of the tech transfer process. In addition, she designed nine concept maps focused on key ideas including intellectual property, risk and marketing.

The maps are essentially flowcharts with every shape or “node” on the map representing a specific tech transfer step, subject or consideration. Each node correlates with an educational resource about that subject that was gathered and vetted by the experts.

What makes TechMaker innovative is that it capitalizes on new aspects of education and technology including the open content movement and wiki spaces. By harnessing the open content movement Grady enabled “community think” allowing experts to contribute, share and edit input to create a collection of information that has never before existed.  

The wiki format, popularized by Wikipedia, made the collaborative process possible. A wiki is a web site that uses special software to create an online space where it’s easy for a group of contributors to develop and edit information and interlinked web sites about a particular topic. Now contributors can enter the TechMaker wiki space to add or edit information at their own convenience.

TechMaker is also designed to be flexible and portable, two other trends in education. “The maps are made up of individual concepts and the concepts make up a body of knowledge that you can develop and move around,” says Grady. So, instead of following a traditional lesson plan or having students read a textbook, educators can use one of the TechMaker maps as the foundation for an entire course or tailor a particular section of the map and incorporate it into an existing curriculum.
“You can customize the curriculum to augment your own intelligence and knowledge on a subject,” says Foley Wilson. “Eventually, I expect that all curricula will trend this way, but right now it’s fairly new.” TechMaker also features assessment tools including a style guide and rubrics to help teachers measure learning.

Currently, TechMaker is being pilot-tested by a group of high schools and institutions of higher learning, many of which are part of the New Mexico WIRED grant.  The tool is expected to be widely available later this year.

When it is, tech industry leaders believe TechMaker will have a far-reaching, positive impact on the technology sector. “TechMaker is the missing piece for tech innovators and those interested in technology transfer in New Mexico and around the nation,” says Duane Dimos, a leader in the New Mexico WIRED program and director of the Materials Science and Technology Center at Sandia National Laboratories.

Megan Fleming is a freelance writer who specializes in technology.