NIST recommends improvements for federal tech transfer, seeks comments

Columbus, OH - According to Jason Rittenberg, "The National Institute of Standards and Technology has released a paper making recommendations to improve federal technology transfer. Recommendations are organized around five topics: regulation and administration, private-sector engagement, R&D workforce, tech transfer tools, and metrics and benchmarks. These recommendations — and the responses they generate — are expected to lead to regulatory and legislative proposals over the course of the next two years."

The Draft Green Paper is part of the Return on Investment Initiative, a project managed by NIST and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to improve the returns on federal R&D investments. The initiative itself is part of the President’s Management Agenda. The paper was produced in part based on feedback from the request for information conducted earlier this year on Stevenson-Wydler and other tech transfer policies.
A summary of NIST’s recommended actions is reproduced below. More details on the intended actions, including what regulatory or legislative changes may be required to implement the solutions, are provided in the paper.
Some of the recommended actions would facilitate lab-corporate collaborations, and may also create new opportunities for tech-based economic development organizations to work with federal agencies and labs:

• Expanding the use of Agreements to Commercialize Technologies, a Department of Energy pilot that is sometimes easier to implement than CRADAs;
• Establishing more nonprofit foundations to facilitate tech transfer from federal R&D agencies;
• Continuing support for SBIR/STTR;
• Increasing agencies’ use of entrepreneurship programs, including I-Corps, for both extramural and intramural training;
• Allowing entrepreneurial leave for federal R&D staff; and,
• Developing a portal for easier identification of federal R&D assets.

The current green paper is considered a draft, and NIST and OSTP are open to further comments on the future scope of the ROI Initiative. In addition to refining the suggestions in the paper, TBED practitioners may wish to encourage future recommendations to recognize more federal programs that support tech transfer and commercialization (particularly Regional Innovation Strategies) and encourage federal labs to partner with regional TBED organizations that already leverage commercialization and entrepreneurship services.
NIST is formally accepting comments on the paper through Jan. 9, 2019. Thoughts can be submitted to roi@nist.gov. SSTI members interested in the process are also encouraged to contact SSTI Policy and Development Director Jason Rittenberg (614.901.1690 | rittenberg@ssti.org).