Abstract
Nearly 40 years ago Congress laid the foundation for federal agencies to engage in technology transfer activities with a primary goal to make federal laboratory research outcomes widely available. Since then, agencies generally rely on universal metrics such as licensing income and number of patents to measure the benefit of their technology transfer program. However, such metrics do not address the requirements set by the current and previous administrations, which require agencies to better gauge the effectiveness and return on investment of their technology programs. Here we evaluate two metrics, filing ratio and transfer rate, and empirically evaluate these metrics using data from Department of the Navy’s most transactionally active laboratory, as well as recently released agency-reported data available from the FY 2015 annual technology transfer report (15 U.S.C. Section 3710). We additionally propose other federally-relevant metrics for which agency data are not currently available. Results presented here indicate that these modernized metrics may potentially fulfill the requirements set by executive guidance. The study findings also point out to other metrics that are relevant to practitioners, program managers, and policymakers in the evaluation of technology transfer programs for better measurement of effectiveness, efficiency, and return on investment.
Highlights
Office of Partnerships and Business Development, Naval Medical Research Center, 503 Robert Grant Ave., Silver Spring, MD 20910, USA
This led to a belief that the most successful ORTAs and technology transfer offices (TTOs, the university equivalent to the federal ORTA) are those that are able to generate the most income through licensing (McDevitt et al 2014)
DoE utilizes “work-for-others” agreements and user facility agreements to permit non-Federal organizations to use its facilities, equipment and technical expertise (Senate 2002); and the National Institutes of Health executes a large number of material transfer and collaboration agreements with academic institutions under the authority of the Public Health Service Act
Summary
“Federal technology transfer” classically refers to transactional mechanisms and the means through which innovations stemming from federal laboratories are transferred to the private sector for development and commercialization. Given that Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) are the chief way by which federal laboratories and industry collaborate together and CRADAs (rather than license agreements) dominate the formal channels of federal technology transfer, the number of CRADAs are routinely reported by agencies (Adams et al.2003; Berman 1994) While those metrics are useful for reporting outcomes, it is notable that none address measures of efficiency related to ongoing practices of the agencies, including measures of “pace” or “effectiveness” explicitly mentioned in the 2011 Presidential Memorandum (Obama 2011) and 2018 President’s management agenda (Trump 2018), respectively. The industry-wide Transfer Rate is approximately 42%, a number that can be used to gauge each agency’s (and individual laboratory’s) relative effectiveness
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