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New technology transfer metrics for the National Institute of Standards and Technology

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Abstract

New technology transfer metrics relevant to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are presented in this paper. From a public sector management perspective, these metrics are important because they extend the current measures of technology transfer to include metrics that are unrelated to the size of the federal laboratory in question. This extension allows for a more meaningful comparison of some aspects of technology transfer activities at federal laboratories with differing sizes, missions, and policies. This paper applies proposed measures of technology transfer to data on NIST’s technology transfer activities, compares these metrics across multiple organizations, provides suggestions for the interpretation of these metrics, describes limitations of these metrics, and suggests areas for future research.

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Notes

  1. ORTAs operate under various names, such as Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs) or Offices of Technology Transactions (OTTs). For consistency, any group within an organization whose primary role is the external transfer of technology is referred to as an ORTA. A broader discussion of this topic is in Link & Oliver (2020). See also Leech & Scott (2021).

  2. Kordal & Guice (2008) report an earlier version of licensing success rate for universities as percentage of licenses or options executed per invention disclosure.

  3. A discussion of invention disclosures in federal laboratories is in Link (2020).

  4. Markman et al., (2005) define “innovation speed” as “the time elapsed between the disclosure of a discovery and the licensing of that discovery.”

  5. Measures of technology transfer activities reported by federal agencies under the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act of 1980 (U.S. Government,1980) aggregate activities by the year in which the activity (e.g., license execution) occurred. In this paper, we aggregate activities by the year in which the invention was disclosed.

  6. It is not necessarily the case that each event that occurs each year is the result of an invention disclosure from that year and calculating LSRs, filing rates, and transfer rates with yearly data may miscalculate these measures. The use of the NIST data addresses this problem by observing invention disclosure individually.

  7. An earlier version of the analysis presented in this paper is in Hall (2021).

  8. This paper calculates the overall rates using the total number of invention disclosures, patent applications, and licenses for the time period in lieu of averaging across the rates for each year. This is done to account for the differences in the number of invention disclosures from year to year and avoid over-weighting years with fewer invention disclosures.

  9. The term ORTA is used exclusively by the federal government. For consistency, this work maintains the use of ORTA as described in foot note 1.

  10. Kordal & Guice (2008) define large institution as those with greater than $250 million in R&D expenditures, medium institutions as those with between $250 million and $75 million in R&D expenditures, and small as those with less than $75 million in R&D expenditures.

  11. Kordal & Guice (2008) report percentage of patents filed per invention disclosure and licenses and options per invention disclosure. The ratio of these two approximates the transfer rate.

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  1. Technology Partnerships Office, Innovation and Industry Services, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, MD, United States

    Michael J. Hall

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Hall, M.J. New technology transfer metrics for the National Institute of Standards and Technology. J Technol Transf 47, 1573–1583 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-022-09947-9

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