New Podcast: How to Apply for and Win Tech Awards

Dr. Nannette Stangle-Castor gives listeners insight about why and how to apply for technology awards in Fuentek’s latest podcast.

Fuentek has released a new podcast about awards—and it’s not just about back patting. In the podcast I discuss the many reasons technology transfer offices should seek awards that their technologies may be eligible for—and go after them with intention. Awards for technology are about far more than a plaque on a shelf—they can actually help TTOs gain deserved recognition within industry and government organizations, which may in turn lead to much-needed funding for further research and development and/or commercialization opportunities.

The podcast gives listeners important information about how awards—particularly well-known accolades like the R&D 100 Award—can increase the value and importance of a technology, establish its industry leadership, and enhance marketing efforts for intellectual property—helping to reach potential licensees or investors interested in technology commercialization more easily. Awards are an external validation of the novelty and promise of your technologies, and they provide third-party credibility. Although applying for awards may seem time consuming and trivial, well-known technologies such as the fax machine, ATMs, HDTVs and halogen lamps received widespread public exposure through winning technology awards.

You can download and listen to the podcast here.

–By Nannette Stangle-Castor, Ph.D.

Tools to Identify Potential Collaborators and R&D Partners

The innovators asked some excellent questions during the training I gave at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center earlier this week. One thing that they wanted to know was how to identify potential partners. How could they find out which organizations were at the cutting edge in various technology disciplines?

This is an excellent question. Here were some suggestions that I provided back to the innovators, based on some of Fuentek’s sources for competitive intelligence:

• Trade publications for the particular discipline, such as ECN: Electronic Component News or Chemical & Engineering News
• University newsletters, such as Technology Review published by MIT
• Meetings for the relevant industry, such as the many IEEE conferences and events
• Industry market reports from organizations such as Frost & Sullivan and Datamonitor can be expensive, but often you can access free “nuggets,” such as company lists and overarching market numbers and trends, in the freely provided tables of contents and press releases announcing the reports
• Journals, such as Nature Biotechnology
  

What are some of your favorite sources for potential technologies and collaborators?

–By Nannette Stangle-Castor, Ph.D.

R&D 100 Awards Point to Revolutionary NASA Antenna Concept

The thin-film ferroelectric High-Resolution Scanning Reglectarray Antenna is pictured above.

A revolutionary antenna concept developed at NASA’s Glenn Research Center enables electronically steerable, high data-rate communications for NASA missions and non-NASA commercial communications applications. The technology’s innovation has been recognized with a prestigious R&D 100 Award.

The thin-film ferroelectric High-Resolution Scanning Reflectarray Antenna (HRSRA) is lighter and has a conformal design that is easier to build and transport into space than conventional technology (e.g., MMIC-direct phased array antennas and gimbaled antennas). In addition, HRSRA’s electronic beam steering capability directs the signal in a specific direction without physical motion, therefore causing no resolution-compromising vibrations—highly beneficial to the sensitive instruments onboard a spacecraft.

The use of the HRSRA for fine beam pointing is vital for future exploration missions to Mars and beyond where precise, efficient communication is necessary. The technology has broader application as well, including consumer applications such as Direct Satellite Service (DSS) communications to homes, vehicles, boats, aircraft and any other terrestrial platform benefiting from a low-profile, aesthetically pleasing antenna.

These improvements over previous antenna technologies as well as broad applicability have been further validated with the nod from R&D Magazine and the R&D 100 Awards. Considered the “Oscars of Innovation,” the awards have identified revolutionary technologies newly introduced to the market since 1963. The technology and Glenn Research Center will be recognized at an award ceremony in November.

For more information, contact: Fuentek, LLC (919) 249-0327, nasa.grc@fuentek.com

–By Nannette Stangle-Castor, Ph.D.

How Do I Address the Customer’s Needs When I Don’t Know Who the Customer Is?

Nannette Stangle-Castor

As I mentioned in my post about the innovation training I did at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center earlier this week, the training discussed some of Fuentek's specific approaches to collaborative R&D and technology transfer—approaches that might be new for some R&D organizations.

Some of these approaches we’ve written about before. For example, check out Laura Schoppe’s Sources for Space Technologies paper, which provides the 6-S model for effectively picking the recipe for innovation and the best partners, which also contributes to future technology commercialization.

Then there’s Understand-Address-Present (UAP), which is a model for overcoming one of the biggest barriers to open innovation: communication with the internal personnel who will ultimately use the technology emerging from the collaborative R&D. I refer to those personnel genuinely (though perhaps unorthodoxly) as customers.

The UAP concept sparked a lot of interest among the NASA innovators and managers at Monday’s training. I explained that thinking of the technology users as customers increases the likelihood that the collaboratively developed technology is more likely to be infused into a NASA mission program.

Some of the attendees pointed out that often the “customer” is not well-defined or the requirements often are in a variable level of definition, making it hard to understand the customer’s needs.

This situation does indeed present a bit of a challenge. Technology development takes time, and waiting is not always an option. If work is not started on a new technology right away (prior to detailed requirements being derived and before the customer has truly been defined), then the chance of this new technology being ready in time for consideration for inclusion into a mission program is unlikely. So collaborative R&D and open innovation and the UAP model don’t really apply, right? Wrong!

When trying to apply industry-developed best practices to government, you have to keep some nuances in mind. And although it’s an expression I’ve never much cared for, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Sure, for many research projects, the ultimate goal is not always well-defined, and the development timelines are often very challenging. In those cases apply the parts of the UAP model that you can when you can. But keep your eye out for the emergence of the customer and more defined requirements. That way, you are ready to move forward when the opportunity presents itself.

For those of you in situations similar to what the NASA innovators described, what are your ideas for monitoring for an emerging customer?

–By Nannette Stangle-Castor, Ph.D.

Cookin’ Up Innovation at NASA

This past Monday, I had the pleasure of teaching innovators and managers at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center about Henry Chesbrough’s concepts of open innovation, Andrew Hargadon’s thoughts about how breakthroughs happen, and Fuentek’s approaches to collaborative R&D and technology transfer. One of the concepts I presented really resonated with the attendees, so I thought I’d share it here.

First a quick tutorial for those of you who don’t know. In Open Innovation, Chesbrough talked about bringing in the best ideas from anywhere (notably from outside your R&D organization) to not only generate the solution for your particular market/application, but also identify new markets for technology commercialization, including licensing opportunities. In Breakthroughs, Hargadon discusses innovation as a recombination of objects, ideas, and people, where “technology brokering” occurs through the forming and breaking down of various networks of those objects, ideas, and people. Both of these thought leaders have some great concepts that are applicable to NASA and many other organizations. (Check out this article in Kennedy Tech Transfer News.)

But some people get hung up on the concepts of open innovation and collaborative R&D. (I’ve blogged previously about overcoming the barriers to open innovation.) So think of it this way…

Innovation is a recipe for a meal, and different meals call for different recipes.

Sometimes the recipe involves procuring off-the-shelf products and making minor modifications. When the timeline is tight and an adequate (or close-to-adequate) solution is available—like when you find out at 3 p.m. you’re having a dozen dinner guests—you buy what you need and tweak it as needed.


Another recipe is closed innovation, where internal-only resources are used to develop the solution to the technical challenge. This is similar to a Rachel Ray 30-minute meal. You pull together ingredients that you have on hand to produce the meal.


Then there’s open innovation, which is like embarking on a Julia Child recipe. Just as she introduced us to cooking in new ways, open innovation challenges us to embrace new sources of technologies and capabilities. The result is not just a nourishing meal, but an experience that feeds many of our senses. In open innovation, the collaboration with external entities results in solutions that are far broader than the initial target. This actually transcends open innovation into what we call Symbiotic Innovation.

Let this cooking metaphor simmer for a while and let me know what you think.

–By Nannette Stangle-Castor, Ph.D.

Applying the 4 P’s to get to “The Science of the Deal:” Tips on Platform

Jack Spain

Editor’s Note: This is the final post in a five-part series examining Fuentek’s Deal-Making 4 P’s.

As I noted in a previous post, Fuentek’s proven Deal-Making 4 P’s can position your Technology Transfer Office (TTO) to more consistently and predictably execute licensing agreements for your institution. The Deal-making 4 P’s are:

1. Planning
2. People
3. Process
4. Platform
   

Let’s take a closer look at Platform. Your TTO can greatly improve efficiency and effectiveness by leveraging modern, low-cost, readily available technology solutions such as IP asset management database applications, calendaring and scheduling, instant messaging, websites, e-mail marketing, Web conferencing, blogs, wikis, microblogging, and other social media tools. It is important that the tools you deploy are intuitive and not overly complex, helping rather than hindering your staff in performing their jobs effectively. Your platform of technology solutions should also be as synergistic as possible to maximize the productivity of your TTO associates.

Regularly evaluate the return on investment (ROI) your organization is receiving from your technology solutions. Solutions should be evaluated in terms of the delivery of positive results (based on both objective and subjective criteria), as well as an examination of whether they are streamlining or impeding your key processes. Several questions to contemplate in this area include:

Has your office invested in technology solutions that support and encourage communication, collaboration, and teamwork throughout your office and across your institution?

Do your tools facilitate workflow and project management? Do you know where each project currently stands and how much time has been invested in it?

Do you have easy and intuitive access to your key databases, or have they become a “black hole” for your critical information? Can you retrieve the patent or marketing status in real time?

How does your organization go about rating the overall effectiveness of your chosen technology solutions?

–By Jack Spain

Low Plasticity Burnishing Method From NASA Gets R&D 100 Nod

The image above shows a turbine engine blade during processing using the LPB method.

An exciting engineering process developed at NASA’s Glenn Research Center uses residual stress in design and is providing a practical solution to fatigue problems for critical components of medical implants. The innovative technology is already making these devices more durable, and its innovation has been further validated with a prestigious R&D 100 Award.

Low Plasticity Burnishing (LPB) offers a method of metal improvement that provides deep, stable surface compressive residual stresses to improve damage tolerance and extend the life of the material. The method is quite useful for critical components used in aerospace and in medical devices. In many cases, its application can change the entire model for design and maintenance of such critical components, yet uses common computed numerically controlled (CNC) coding and can be easily integrated into any normal machining process. In short, LPB adds safety and fatigue strength to critical parts without changing the material or physical design of the component.

Tested and proven by NASA, the military, and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) for aircraft and ground-based turbines and aging aircraft, LPB already is saving millions of taxpayer dollars and making structural metallic components safer for passengers, pilots, workers, soldiers and everyday people. The method is also enabling improved strength and safety for medical devices, helping to improve lives of patients.

These important life-changing advantages were recognized with the nod from R&D Magazine and the R&D 100 Awards. Considered the “Oscars of Innovation,” the awards have identified revolutionary technologies newly introduced to the market since 1963. The technology and Glenn Research Center will be recognized at an awards ceremony in November.

For more information, contact: Fuentek, LLC (919) 249-0327, nasa.grc@fuentek.com

–By Nannette Stangle-Castor, Ph.D.