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The Basic Food Chain: From Research to Commercialization
by Materials Evaluation Technical Editor Emmanuel P. Papadakis*
How do you get from here to there? Every process needs a procedure or a road map - not to mention a good idea of how you know when you do get there. Are we there yet?
Frank Iddings
Tutorial Projects Editor
In nondestructive testing, the "food chain" begins with something unknown and ends with an object fully defined. The basic need is to find the completed object.
What I mean about "unknown" is that a question or problem arises which has never been solved before. An ASNT NDT Level III technician faced with this problem has the authority to choose a method to solve it. The technician also has the authority to declare that the problem cannot be solved by existing methods if that indeed be the case. In such a case, products for sale on the open market cannot solve this problem. Your favorite salesperson or supplier comes up empty.
This sort of question needs research at some level to find a path to a solution. If nothing is known, then basic research is called for. Basic research is the first step of the chain. On the other hand, some inkling of ideas for solutions may be on the books already. In this case, applied research is used.
Beyond applied research, one goes into a development phase. Development goes through several stages like the technical feasibility trial (sometimes part of applied research), the plant or field feasibility trial to show actual unambiguous utility in practical circumstances and a hardening phase in which a survivable and operable device or instrument is built. This step is engineering. The object built is the culmination of all the foregoing steps.
There is a great deal of confusion as to what really constitutes technology transfer.
The earlier steps may have involved one person or hundreds, sometimes in groups handing off the novel product from one group to the next along the food chain as progress is made. More and more money is being invested as the process goes on. Ideally, concurrent engineering should be applied. The final step is the writing of a users' manual which explains not only the "bells and whistles" but also the problems the object can solve.
The next step is technology transfer. This means not only getting the object into the hands of the user who had the problem in the first place but also distributing similar objects into the hands of all other potential users with analogous problems.
There is a great deal of confusion as to what really constitutes technology transfer. Some people aver that technology transfer occurs much earlier in the chain, such as when the researcher hands off a breadboard model to an applications engineer for a technical feasibility study. I assert that this is not true. I believe that technology transfer has not occurred until the steps of getting the completed object into the hands of all users has begun in earnest and progressed into multiple sales.
Thus, my definition of technology transfer includes manufacturing, marketing and sales. In other words, commercialization.
My definition states that technology transfer has occurred after three of the objects have changed hands for money between buyers and sellers, each ready, willing and able to consummate a deal. This is just like selling a house on the open real estate market.
Why three of the objects? The first one is not sufficient because it may be a prototype under a development contract. The buyer and seller then would have agreed in advance upon the purchase or transfer of the first instrument. Neither is making an arms length transaction. The second copy of the object does not qualify either because it is often under contract just to ascertain whether the object can be duplicated. Thus, I conclude that three sold objects is the minimum set of transactions to permit the nomenclature "technology transfer." Then, finally, a third party has purchased one.
It is often true that the output of a long term contract is an object which is delivered by a university to a government agency. Even if the government agency uses this deliverable until Doomsday, technology transfer has not occurred. Similarly, the delivery of the second copy to that agency does not constitute technology transfer. Selling a third copy to a second agency or to a company would be technology transfer.
Upon occasion, the research arm of a corporation delivers an object to an operating division under a reciprocal arrangement. The use of this object by the factory of the operating division does not constitute technology transfer. As an example, at Ford my NDT research and development group developed an automated eddy current test set for measuring case hardening depth and delivered the usable engineering prototype to an axle factory which used it. No more of the test sets were made or sold. Technology transfer did not happen. On the other hand, Rocco Torre of Automation Industries, in conjunction with General Motors, discovered that ultrasonic velocity is a predictor of strength in nodular cast iron. This discovery was turned into technology and has been sold as instruments by NDT companies to the automobile industry and to the iron foundry industry. Many instruments are installed and used to measure nodular cast iron. All the steps in the food chain were ascended successfully in this case and technology transfer was accomplished.
A great example of technology transfer is sitting in your refrigerator. It is the milk that is fortified with vitamin A and vitamin D (D being the more critical). Both were synthesized by organic chemistry in the 1930s by Nicholas A. Milas, of MIT. Technology transfer happened when a dairy opted to add Vitamin D to its product. An intermediary pharmaceutical company had to carry out the engineering to create the reactors to do the organic synthesis in quantity. Vitamin pill companies also bought into the technology transfer. Innumerable copies have been sold in free and unfettered commerce. Suddenly, babies remained healthy in the winter and people's bones improved.
How much active participation Milas took in the technology transfer is not known to me. I do know that the synthesis he performed required the use of some chemical compounds first synthesized by my father, Philippos E. Papadakis. His publishing of a scientific paper describing the synthesis of the intermediate compounds was not technology transfer; rather, it was basic research feeding the applied research of Milas. Someone higher in the food chain than Milas did the development and engineering for the chemical factory which produced the edible vitamins. The whole process was complicated, but resulted in technology transfer and very high sales.
An interesting aside is about the initial discovery of vitamin D. Herodotus, the Greek historian of the fifth century BC, came upon an ancient battlefield where the carnage had been so great that the phalanxes of the dead had been left unburied for centuries. The battle had been between a culture whose male members wore turbans and a culture where the men shaved their heads. When Herodotus pounded upon the craniums of the skulls with his walking stick, the formerly turbaned ones crumbled while the shaved ones remained durable. Herodotus concluded that the action of the sun upon the skin, when alive, improved the durability of the bones. As is now known, the connection is vitamin D. Sunlight synthesizes vitamin D in the human being and builds strong bones.
One is confident that good ideas in the NDT field will continue to be developed and sold even if they require centuries.
* Quality Systems Concepts, Inc., 379 Diem Woods Dr., New Holland, PA 17557; (717) 355-2142; e-mail <papadakis@desupernet.net>.
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