Commerce Department Taking Up Need to Commercialize More Federal R&D

“Even in areas where we are allocating enough funding for R&D, we’re not doing a good enough job getting these ideas into the marketplace, particularly through entrepreneurs.

“For much of the last century, the way we moved federal R&D out of our labs and into the marketplace worked well enough… It wasn’t a terribly efficient system, but for a time, it didn’t really matter, because the United States was the unquestioned leader in innovation…

“But those days are over – and today, too many of our research ideas never make it out of the lab, and if they do, they get lost in the “valley of death,” where a high-risk idea doesn’t have the resources or the funding to make it to market.

“The United States has not adjusted to a new global marketplace where foreign countries and foreign companies have the ability to outpace their American counterparts.

“It’s not tenable for the United States to continue with the status quo. In a world where innovation is critical to U.S. competitiveness, we must do everything in our power to optimize commercialization that stems from our nation’s vast research investments.”

Full Presentation : http://www.commerce.gov/NewsRoom/SecretarySpeeches/prod01_008812.

and http://www.commerce.gov/NewsRoom/SecretarySpeeches/PROD01_008778.

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Idaho National Laboratory -Through collaboration with industry partners, INL’s Technology Transfer and Commercialization office makes available to American agencies and international organizations unique facilities and expertise. http://www.matr.net/click.php?id=&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.inl.gov%2Ftechtransfer