Problems Of Technology Transfer Research Articles

Environmental impacts of increasing the world's food production

World demand for food is expanding more rapidly than ever before in history to rising population and increasing affluence. The urgency of increasing food production should not be underestimated. It is vitally important, however, to ensure that the strategies adopted to increase food production on short-term basis can be sustained and effectively integrated with long-term policies. With many of our present policies, there is a very real danger that in our efforts to increase food production in the short-run on a crisis basis, we may adopt strategies which are self-defeating in the long-run. Any strategy to increase food production on a sustained basis that does not explicitly consider environmental factors is doomed to failure, sooner or later. Strategies developed must work with nature and not against it. Within this philosophical framework, the major parameters that could improve yield of food grains and could possibly deteriorate the very ecological base on which food production depends, and thus ultimately jeopardize the production process itself, are discussed. Among the parameters reviewed are food loss and wastage during production, storage and distribution; environmental constraints in relation to the use of pesticides and fertilizers; problems arising due to improper land use planning and irrigation practices; effects of climatic changes on food production; and problems of technology transfer and use.

Research Resource Needs for the Future

This overview of the past, present, and future of research and development related to severely visually impaired persons covers the following subjects: documentation, creation of an armamentarium of aids (including both ordinary and highly sophisticated devices), the financing of R&D, the problem of technology transfer, dealing with change, the need for better theoretical models, and new definitions of the reality in which severely visually impaired individuals and those who work with them and for their benefit find themselves.

Management of technology transfer in an advanced project — The case of Surveyor

This paper uses a specific advanced project — the Surveyor — as a basis for presenting a number of problems in technology transfer and the methods used to solve the problems. The paper emphasizes the importance of mission orientation to transfer and outlines the several organizational approaches that were tried before assigning full-time project groups within the discipline departments. Several examples of planning problems are followed by a description of the organizational methods developed to deal with them. These include “working residencies,” independent evaluation of prototypes and analysis by the user in parallel with the provider, design reviews, failure-mode analysis, and problem-failure reporting.