“We have meet the enemy and he is us.” (Walt Kelly, Pogo, Earth Day 1970) -- Thinking about the future of Technology and Knowledge Transfer

For far too long, those of us in the academic research sector have been saying, “Knowledge is a good. Trust us. Sooner or later the good stuff gets applied and our job is to help make that happen”.?Or we say when faced with a dilemma concerning the social benefit of a disclosed invention: “All knowledge is value neutral, whether it’s useful or good depends on who picks it up.” Face it, with human induced climate disaster here, that approach just hasn’t worked as well as the early proponents of technology transfer hoped. Of course, a lot of us knew a long time ago that it wasn’t anywhere near optimal for maximizing the public’s investment in science. So there has been a series of legislation and approaches for improving technology transfer (or as it?I somewhat curiously called here in Europe) knowledge transfer (which always makes me wonder if people using the term thing educating students is not knowledge transfer.)

A fundamental problem, of course, is the dominant paradigm for technology transfer is post-hoc, after the fact. It takes a given research result and asks what good is it and who can use it and how do I get it in their hands. It is always tech-push looking for market-pull. The research writes a proposal and gets it funded, does the research, files a disclosure, and then the TTO or KTO picks it up and scratches its head and asks: Does anyone even care? Should we try to commercialize this? Only if the answer is yes do questions like should we patent it, should we license it, should we encourage a spin-out get asked. [This is not to deny or downplay the creativity and innovation occurring within the tech transfer community, but this paradigm still dominates].

Translation research differs in a significant way from the current post-hoc approach to technology transfer. In translation research, you figure out how to get it into the end-user’s hands as part of the projects design. In new product development (NPD), we call this concurrent engineering, which includes listening to the voice of the customer.

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Translation research is a term that comes of medical science. As explained by Elaine Wethington in What is translational research? (cornell.edu): “it is a systematic effort to convert basic research knowledge into practical applications to enhance human health and well-being. …Translational research is broader than the traditional term “applied research.”?Applied research is any research that may possibly be useful for enhancing health or well-being. It does not necessarily have to have any effort connected with it to take the research to a practical level …[and does not] include some “action steps.”?[In translation research] the researchers would partner with a community and ask for ideas about how their findings might apply there.?Together, they would come up with an intervention plan that would also include scientific evaluation of its effectiveness.”

Translational research requires interaction with end-users and intermediaries It can be a way of doing basic research as much as applied. When used with TRL 1 to 3, the end-users are the folks who will take those results and further mature them till they are market ready. What makes its translation is the attention paid to how it makes peoples lives better, not as an aspect concept, but in the sense of these people (this customer segment in NPD) in this way (a downstream application envisioned) and including in the research project design a plan for how that can happen. One consequence is translational research always involves moving technology from one TRL to a higher one. Even in very fundamental research, where moving up the TRL ladder may occur in the research instrumentation, this can have positive benefits. For example, medical diagnosis and non-destructive test have a strong relation with advances in research instrumentation. If you stop and think about it, something always is being matured in a research project which can make this world a better place to live if we take that ojective seriously.

That simple realization – there is a lot of positive things that can happen if the people proposing even the most fundamental research project are asked to explain who it might benefit and how and to demonstrate they actually thought about that answer. The US National Science Foundation’s new program, Accelerating Research Translation (found at Accelerating Research Translation (ART) (nsf23558) | NSF - National Science Foundation) is using a funding “carrot” to encourage universities to embracing the practice of thinking about what is beneficial in their research and how to get it to the people who can use it. It probably is the most significant NSF program for transforming the US research and innovation ecosystem since SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) and STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer Research). It provides a significant financial incentive for universities to make translational research an integral part of their institutional approach to science by changing the way they educate and training grad students, support post-docs, promote faculty, and interact with regional ecosystems. The hope is by holding out this cash carrot, proposers will think outside the box and develop models for transforming their universities and the research enterprise.

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Stop and think for a moment. In this era of know-nothingism, luddite attitudes towards vaccines, climate change, declining public respect for science (and truth), why wouldn’t we want to say to taxpayers, politicos, and the public at large: “The reason we deserve your support for our research is because we are working to make this a better world and this is how. Help us figure out how to make it even more beneficial for you.” ?Perhaps it's time for tech transfer professionals to focus on how we transform our roles and training (including RTTP) so we become facilitators and champions of, and core participants in, translation research. It we shift our paradigm, the current things we do remain useful as tools for planning and implementing "an intervention plan that would also include scientific evaluation of its effectiveness.”