Congress Dings NASA on Tech Transfer
AIP FYI #102: Subcommittee Examines NASA Derived Technology Transfer Activities
“Regarding the IG report, Palazzo commented that “the IG found a general lack of awareness among NASA program managers about the technology transfer and commercialization process and that many personnel did not understand the range of technologies that could be considered as technological assets. Furthermore, the report found that the number of patent attorneys and dedicated Innovative Partnership Office staff – and related funding – was insufficient given the technology transfer and commercialization potential.”
The IG report on NASA technology transfer is very well done. It reveals how multiple NASA intellectual property and IP transfer mechanisms have simply eroded, been forgotten or were just neglected over time.
The IG’s report conclusions show quantitative summaries from surveys conducted. Unfortunately the report does not delve into the quantification of the intellectual property, the value of that property and what has been lost, in dollars terms, from these failures by NASA.
Clearly NASA-OCT and other managers have a number of technology transfer mechanisms to fix and months of corrective actions to take. But after that, I would urge the Congress and the IG to revisit the matter and assess the volumes of intellectual property; as well as the task of assigning value to the intellectual property. This is to suggest that the IG and a competent financial team derive examples and demonstrate the process, not that they should pursue valuation of all of NASA’s IP. That’s NASA’s job.
I would recommend the IG revisit the matter accompanied by an agency, such as the OMB or similarly financially and economically skilled group, so rigorous values can be assigned to NASA technologies, innovations, and developments.
Some of you might say “Why do that?” If so, I suggest you read or reread the IG report. For all of the surveys, findings, and recommendations the report is devoid of dollars, economic impact summaries and financials, except for the cost of tech transfer attorneys and related costs. If NASA technology transfer has anything to do with commercialization in the United States or if it has any purpose linked to serving, positively impacting, or benefiting the U.S. economy, then the costs incurred in developing those innovations and new technologies AND the analytically determined projected value of those technologies, when matured and commercialized, should be evaluated and presented.
If you read the report, can you determine what the overall U.S. economic, dollar impact, is from NASA’s failure to transfer and commercialize innovations it has created? Can you determine the loss, in dollars, of royalties NASA has forfeited? Is the impact a $ million dollars? A billion? Ten billion? Nothing?
The recommended financial analysis described above may seem difficult and arduous and for some it probably is. But there are skilled industry professionals that do valuation assessments and economic analyses of this type, everyday. The examples the IG provide in the report, i.e. – Gulfstream SAR pod or the fiber-optic sensor technology would be two of many straight forward technologies that could be assessed this way.
Things like financial analyses and the quantification of value and intellectual property may be foreign to many and completely ignored by others. But in this economy, requirements for those analyses and for ‘accountability’ will in all likelihood intensify.
npng, Since NASA is tax payer funded shouldn’t the goal be to get NASA inventions in the hands of US industry and universities rather than trying to make money by licensing patents? NASA licensing patents starts to get close to NASA doing commercial work that competes with industry. And NASA is never going to make much money from licenses on the core technology that it needs… because if there was commercial potential in solving the hard problems in spaceflight, we wouldn’t need government funding to solve them. Sure, every now and then some tech NASA needs will have a commercial use, but if the focus is on spending R&D resources only on things with commercial use we’re never going to make progress on solving the hard problems that aren’t commercial.
NASA’s next-gen mission operations software, Mission Control Technologies (MCT) has been transferred to the public for free, under the Apache 2.0 open source license. We keep updating it, with some of the more interesting updates being described on our blog. We’ll be demonstrating it at the NASA exhibit table at the NewSpace 2012 conference in Santa Clara this week, Thursday through Saturday, July 26-28, 2012. Find our web site by searching for “open mission control technologies”. Find our blog by searching for “open mct blog”. Find the NewSpace details by searching for NewSpace 2012.