Getting Great Ideas to Market is ORAU Board and Council Focus
According to Steve Nichols, associate vice president for research at the University of Texas, technology by itself has no social value. But when researchers can find an application of their research that meets a social need, amazing things can happen.
Nichols explained this phenomenon during the workshop portion of the 62nd annual meeting of the ORAU board and council. He asked the group to imagine a practical use for a device that combined high density digital storage, in a very small enclosure, with audio playback capabilities. That technology was available for a good while, but Nichols said it took an innovator like Apple Inc.,’s Steve Jobs to apply that technology toward “the social need to ‘get your groove on.’ Thus we have the iPod®.”
America’s research university laboratories have no shortage of great technological ideas. Finding both an application and a market for those ideas, however, poses some serious challenges. Those issues took center stage during the two-day “Innovation and Academia” workshop conducted at the Oak Ridge Center for Advanced Studies on March 6-7, 2007.
Neil Iscoe from the University of Texas, and Lita Nelsen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, both of whom serve in their respective universities’ well-developed technology transfer offices, offered strategies, success stories and warnings about potential pitfalls to the council members.
For an outsider’s perspective, H. Lee Martin, a former ORNL scientist, founder of the iPix Corporation, and author of the book “Techonomics: The Theory of Industrial Evolution (Industrial Innovation)” told the group that he saw several impediments to getting more of the great innovations discovered at university labs to the marketplace.
“We’re still using classroom methods that are 200 years old,” said Martin who helped lead a unique course on technological entrepreneurship at the University of Tennessee in 2000-2001. “We need to exchange books for computers, paper references for electronic references and classrooms for virtual teams.”
As Martin extolled the virtues of moving toward virtual environments to teach entrepreneurship, the workshop’s keynote speaker, U.S. Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, appeared at the meeting “virtually” from Washington, D.C., via videoconferencing.
Gordon spoke about his work in the House of Representatives to pass the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy Act. Its mission is to help decrease the country’s dependence on foreign energy supplies by finding and financially supporting the most innovative ideas for energy production. He also emphasized his support for ORAU’s work to create programs, such as the Science and Engineering Education pilot program, that put K-12 students and teachers into laboratory settings to help inspire the next generation of innovators at an early age.
“The best ideas come from home,” Gordon said. “I would certainly like to see Oak Ridge Associated Universities be—if not the pilot—one of the first such programs out of the box.”