Building Bridges for a Faster Path to Technology Transfer

More than $150 billion in federal funding is invested in R&D annually in the United States. A key question is whether or not we are getting the maximum return on that investment.

Right now, the answer is that we could do better ⁽¹⁾. Although technology transfer from 1996 to 2013 has contributed $518 billion to the U.S. gross domestic product and $1.1 trillion to the U.S. gross industrial output—with an impact of producing 3.8 million jobs for the U.S. economy⁽²⁾—there are still many promising new technologies in government and university laboratories with no clear path to commercialization.

One of the clear themes that emerged from this discussion was the significant need to build better and stronger bridges between different players in the innovation-to-commercialization pipeline.