President Obama wants accelerated action at the federal labs

Tech Transfer Is Now Hot

December 2011 / January 2012 By: Tom Michael Volume 9 Number 6

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For years, experts in the private sector and in Congress have complained that America’s national laboratories aren’t doing enough to transfer their cutting-edge technology to the marketplace and create jobs. Now, the president of the United States has joined the list of folks who think America’s crown jewels of research and innovation are underachieving when it comes to technology transfer. President Barack Obama basically said as much last month when he issued a memorandum directing the federal government to “expand its ability to transfer science and engineering breakthroughs from the laboratory to the commercial marketplace.”
“With too many families struggling and too many businesses fighting to keep their doors open, we can’t wait for Congress to take action,” President Obama said in October.  “I am directing my administration to take steps to help American businesses create new products, compete in a global economy and create jobs here at home.”
The Presidential Memorandum directs all federal agencies with research facilities to do three key things: 
• Streamline and accelerate the process for private-public research partnerships, small business research and development grants and university-startup collaborations. The White House contends this will result in grants to startups being made 50 percent  faster.
• Accept more flexibility to work with industry and create new partnerships with local communities, support the growth of regional innovation clusters and share laboratory facilities with local businesses.
 • Institute more accountability by developing a five-year plan with concrete goals and metrics to measure progress, including keeping track of how many patents each lab is generating.

The White House said speeding up the technology transfer process will make more efficient use of the roughly $147 billion the federal government invests in research and development every year. 
Tom Kalil, deputy director for policy in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, said Obama views federal tech transfer as a cornerstone of America’s economic turnaround.
“America’s history of economic growth is the result not only of its ingenuity and innovation but also its talent for commercializing those innovations and turning them into products, businesses and jobs,” Kalil said. “To maintain the nation’s leadership, the president is committed to strengthening best practices in our laboratories for licensing, entrepreneurship training and regional development.”
Officials at several DOE labs said they welcome the president’s initiative.
Mike Paulus, director of technology transfer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said the lab “is absolutely delighted by the emphasis on tech transfer.
“We appreciate the high-level support in Washington for the importance of tech transfer,” Paulus said. “We think the emphasis he is putting on it is appropriate.”
Paulus said he’s been running Oak Ridge’s tech transfer efforts for only two years, but in that time has seen a significant uptick in attention to the issue from DOE headquarters. He said Karina Edmonds, DOE’s new tech transfer coordinator, is pushing the labs to improve their efforts.
“I definitely see significant effort on the part of the department to be more aggressive with tech transfer,” Paulus said. “There is a real emphasis at the program level. And she is making them (private industry) aware of the opportunities that exist for them at the national labs.”
Paulus suggested that part of the historic challenge in conducting technology transfer effectively is the geographic location of some of the labs. Many of them—such as Los Alamos National Laboratory situated in the remote mountains of northern New Mexico—were constructed under a cloak of secrecy and designed to be inaccessible from the outside.

Today, the labs would like to generally be open for business but getting that word out to a business community that doesn’t know much about them is a challenge.“I think it’s incumbent on us in remote places to take that extra step and reach out,” Paulus said. Officials at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico provided this statement regarding the president’s directive:
“Sandia welcomes efforts to simplify the way U.S. companies, including small businesses, find out about opportunities to bring the lab's research and technology to the marketplace.
“Sandia carries out technology transfer efforts because we believe they not only create jobs and make our country economically competitive, but they also support the labs' national security mission. Sandia offers many ways for companies to partner with the labs, including licensing intellectual property and technology, joining Sandia in mutually beneficial research partnerships and helping small businesses through programs to solve their technical problems or to notify them about ways to become suppliers at Sandia."

Senator Jeff Bingaman, a New Mexico Democrat who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has been trying to prod the labs to become more proactive on the technology transfer front for more than two decades. Most recently, the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which Bingaman authored with former Senator Pete Domenici, a Republican, directed the hiring of a tech transfer policy coordinator at DOE, among other things.
Bingaman, who is retiring at the end of 2012, said he was happy to see President Obama’s new directive that builds on past congressional efforts.
“Our national laboratories are doing some of the most innovative and exciting research in the world.  Much of what they do has both defense and non-defense applications, which is why Senator Domenici and I worked together to on a law more than two decades ago to commercialize lab R&D,” Bingaman said.  “And, building on that law, a few years ago Congress passed a law to create or strengthen science parks in areas near national labs. A great example of what science parks can do to create jobs is in New Mexico, where 7,550 direct and indirect jobs have been created over the past 13 years at Sandia Science and Technology Park. 
“I share President Obama's belief that our economy can benefit from a continued effort to streamline the tech transfer process.  We have a lot to gain from the innovation of our labs.”

Tom Michael is Innovation’s Washington bureau chief.