Abstract
Technology transfer (TT) between academia and industry is an important source of innovation and economic development and is becoming increasingly relevant across a diversity of research fields. Successful TT depends on effective communication between academic and external partners. This is best facilitated by an academic intermediary who can provide meaningful interactions. An academic intermediary can ensure expertise and knowledge are communicated using a common language and that goals and expectations are clear between partners. In the field of remote sensing where complex technologies, datasets and analyses are required to develop user friendly products, intermediaries play a particularly essential role. The rapid expansion of the remote sensing sector over the last decade, including sensor technologies and the volume of freely available data, has created a bottleneck between available data and technology and ready to use products. In an effort to address this bottleneck and establish a long-term innovation platform and thematic TT infrastructure, FERN.Lab, Remote Sensing for Sustainable Use of Resources Helmholtz Innovation Lab was founded at the Geodesy Department of the German Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) in January 2020. FERN.Lab is funded by the Helmholtz Association, the largest scientific organization in Germany. The goal of FERN.Lab is to facilitate TT and deliver remote sensing products to commercial and non-commercial partners by acting as an expert intermediary platform. FERN.Lab will improve the TT activities of GFZ from two distinct approaches. The first is a “pull” approach where tailor-made technologies are developed for and funded by external third parties. The second is a “push” approach where existing departmental technologies with high market potential are promoted. The pull and push of technologies to external partners is accomplished by a set of competencies and services delivered by the core FERN.Lab team. Competencies include business development, scientific development, software development, and public relations which directly address institutional, financial and skills gap that can cause the TT process to fail. By implementing a robust TT framework for remote sensing products, the impact of research has the potential to be much broader and farther reaching. Additionally, these efforts can improve the acceptance of remote sensing outside of academia improving and modernizing methods used in diverse sectors which in turn can benefit not only individual partners but also politics, society, and the environment. As application-oriented innovation platform, with a close interaction with partners and customers, FERN.Lab will be a crucial part of modern TT at GFZ.
Highlights
Knowledge and technology transfer between academia and society has long been recognized as a key driver of innovation and economic development (Bercovitz and Feldman, 2006; Mowery and Shane, 2002)
Current KTT frameworks are often viewed as mutually exclusive or as direct competition for resources and reputation with scientific work. This results in lost opportunities for further operational development of innovative ideas being developed in research settings
The Helmholtz Association, a union of 18 autonomous German research institutes specializing in a wide range of fields, has recently emphasized, and actively promoted technology transfer (TT) through multiple initiatives to support the Helmholtz Centres transfer activities including the creation of the Helmholtz Innovation Labs (HILs) funding program in 2015
Summary
Knowledge and technology transfer (hereafter referred to as KTT) between academia and society has long been recognized as a key driver of innovation and economic development (Bercovitz and Feldman, 2006; Mowery and Shane, 2002). Fails to reach the market because of an inability to advance the technologies demonstration phase through commerciali zation phase” (Frank et al, 1996, Fig. 1) The reasons for this are due to institutional, financial and skills gap which create a missing link in the transition of an emerging or existing technology to a market-driven business (Barr et al, 2014). Limitations to successful KTT of applied research between academia to other sectors can generally be explained by two specific barriers of cognitive differences and different goals (de Wit-de Vries et al, 2019) These barriers can be more generally under stood as first, a lack of expertise and knowledge by the non-academic partner and second, poor communication between the two parties leading to different expectations, goals and desired outcomes. Where complex technologies, datasets, and analyses are central to research, such as remote sensing (RS; defined here as information about the Earth’s litho-, atmo-, hydro-, and biosphere gathered by spaceborne, airborne and ground-based remote sensing systems), intermediaries who have sector-specific knowledge play an essential role in effective KTT
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