Technology Transfer and Entrepreneurship (Discontinued) - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2016

Background: Rice is the staple food in the area called the monsoon Asia because of its high yield favored by the sun and rain. The rice agriculture is crucially important to Japan for food security; meanwhile, the imported wheat is cheaper than the domestic rice. The irony is the need to reserve rice agriculture despite the oversupply of rice because of cheap wheat from USA. Objective: To prepare for a bad harvest due to a bad weather, Japan needs to reserve rice agriculture even when wheat can be cheaply imported. This paper proposes a possible policy for Japan to receive rice-related technology from abroad in order to develop a new side-market of rice for the domestic consumption. Method: This paper uses a set of conceptual analysis methods like the need analysis, the obstacle analysis, the dilemma analysis, the irony analysis and the conflict analysis. Results: For the above-stated objective, this paper proposes for Thailand to transfer her newly developed rice-product technology to Japan. This paper assesses its acceptability to Japan. Conclusion: Using this technology, a new rice-product is expected to develop a new market of rice in Japan. This is expected to help Japan reserve rice agriculture for food security. Its possible agro-technological obstacles and US-Japan trade obstacle are also discussed.

In December, 2015, mainstream media coverage of a U.S. Supreme Court petition led to the revelation that Puerto Rico was $72 billion in debt. In January, 2016, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control) issued a travel precaution to Puerto Rico due to the Zika virus. Given the tenor of public opinion, there was further media speculation concerning the impact on Puerto Rico’s tourism industry. However, tourism is a relatively small part of its economy. This paper examines the potential for media impact on the life sciences industry in Puerto Rico, which represents some 25% of its GDP, and over half of Puerto Rico’s exports, comprised of $40 billion in pharmaceuticals and $4 billion in medical devices. Included are media ramifications relating to governmental status, specifically with regard to the life sciences industry, and how other governmental actions have impacted Puerto Rico’s innovation capabilities. The Strategic Science-Business Media (SSBM) Model is used as guide to examining select media coverage relating to the life sciences industry. Two global industry-related reports/databases were also compared: The Nature Index [4da], which provides a 12-month rolling window of high-quality scientific articles from 158 countries, including the life sciences, and the Scientific American worldVIEW Scorecard, which analyzes and interprets data to rank 54 countries for innovation potential in biotechnology on a yearly basis. This comparison will show how Puerto Rico’s life sciences capability was inadvertently underrepresented and/or misrepresented, when combining data from two industry reports/databases, due to confusion regarding the unusual governmental status of Puerto Rico with respect to the United States. As a result of this study, this paper shall also present a revision to the SSBM model, Strategic Science-Business Media Model 2.0, to include the role of industry reports and global databases. Conclusions indicate that constant vigilance is required regarding underrepresentation and/or misrepresentation in the media, industry reports and global databases, and that more recognition in traditional media is now possible given the emergence of Puerto Rico’s research community’s ability to commercialize and now forge Puerto Rico’s reputation as a life sciences innovation cluster in the future.

While numerous studies have been published about product time-to-market and the ways it can be improved, limited information is known about the time leading up to the creation of new intellectual property that could be the basis of these new products; in particular the time between basic research, discovery, and generation of protectable intellectual property (e.g. patents). Using the patents issued to all of the campuses in the University of California system in calendar year 2012 as our sample set, we analyzed the patent data in terms of the filing date, issue date, patent class, assignee(s), and whether the patent referenced support from a government grant. From this we were able to determine the pendency period of the patents (how long it took after filing to issue), the field in which they fell, which federal agency(cies), if any, provided research support or funding, and whether it was solely or jointly owned; the latter being indicative of a collaborative effort. We then cross referenced the government grant information against published grant abstracts. From this we were able to determine, among other things, period of time the project underwent research before the filing of the patent (or in other words, length of R that preceded the filing of the patent). The results show a wide diversity in lead time. The median lead time for NIH funded projects is nearly twice as long as NSF funded projects, 11.3 years vs 5.5 years.

Engineers and natural scientist are required to suggest successful utilization of their discoveries and secure property rights to their universities whenever possible. Here I develop a novel model that optimizes the process of innovation by dividing it into three separate phases following the pre-innovative discovery; i.e., an application phase, a design phase, and an entrepreneurial phase. The phases are identified in the well-described innovation of the electron tube from Edison’s light bulb. Each phase consists of an abductive process, where a large selection of possible solutions is created, followed by selection of viable solutions among them according to their fitness in an entrepreneurial niche. An innovation is described in an evolutionary setting, starting with a novel discovery which becomes the Source (S) of an innovation. In the application phase, a viable application (A) of the Source is selected among a variety of possible applications. This again becomes the basis for a viable design (D) in the design phase. Finally, to become a viable innovation the particular discovery, application and design has to fit into an entrepreneurial niche (N) with a high fitness. To become a successful innovation all four elements (SAN D) need to be optimized by abduction. The present SAND model is different from all other innovative models in its focus on three separate creative abductive processes, yet current innovative theories can be described in the four dimensional innovation space by mapping along its four SAND axes. Analysis of fitness landscapes is in the present report used to visualize the events leading to incremental versus radical innovation, sustaining versus disruptive innovation, as well as the difference between technology and meaning-changes in design. Leading innovation models thus fit in as specialized scenarios under the general model. A low level of redundancy was found between the SAND model and the Stage-Gate model, but the differing theoretical foundations have the effect that the two models are complementary rather than overlapping.

Since the signing of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, the licensing of technology from academic institutions has become increasingly complex. Material transfer agreements (MTAs), intended to protect the owners of discoveries while promoting the sharing of scientific material, have become more human-resource intense and time-consuming. Technology transfer offices (TTOs), now present at most academic institutions, are tasked with the goal of becoming a profit center while simultaneously needing to facilitate the sharing of materials and data with other institutions, as dictated by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines for federally funded research. As a result, many TTOs operate without profit. Decreasing the complexity of the MTA process is paramount to not only create a more efficient TTO, but also to make the sharing of research tools easier so that the myriad of materials stored in laboratory freezers may be utilized by other investigators whose research would benefit from their use. For-profit and nonprofit companies and organizations have therefore created a variety of solutions to improve the MTA process. This article will discuss several of these programs, including electronic MTAs, standardized MTAs and repository strategies, and highlight how they have facilitated the sharing of research tools.

Exploiting scientific and technical breakthroughs is notoriously synonymous to an extremely challenging journey as it typically requires breaking free from established consensuses and models. A first step in the creation of novel economic activity is to recognise the paradigm-changing fundamentals of a new radical innovation, to identify the portfolio of products or services that could be derived from the new advances, and to bundle the relevant patents both for the purposes of ensuring freedom-to-operate as well as of securing the time-limited market exclusivity that composition-ofmatter patent claims bring. A second step is to access the required financial and human resources, and to generate the initial data that establish the proof-of-concept basis required to secure the further financial resources needed for reaching the next step in the venture creation process. A third step for the nascent company is to attract larger partners with competences in manufacturing, selling, and incrementally improving the new products. In the pharmaceutical industry, the last successful deployment of a radical innovation has been the coming of age of monoclonal antibodies. The emergence of novel paradigm-changing product spaces have since accelerated with novel product candidate classes including therapeutic stem cells, chimeric antigen receptor T-cells, or therapeutic nucleic acids such as siRNA, miRNA, or aptamers and gene therapies. In the chemical industry, the last radical innovation, which still needs to deeply permeate the industry, has been that of biofuels and sustainable chemicals including commodity chemicals and innovative polymers. Historic reviews of the cases of therapeutic antibodies and of biofuels are presented here highlighting the major trends and steps that enable the creation of novel economic activities from the transfer of academic discoveries.