Erin Shaw

"Distance Education and the problem of Technology Transfer"   Small Research Awards Seminar

10/24/2003: 10:30am - 12:00pm
11th Floor Large Conference Room

Abstract: Participants: Kate LaBore and Erin Shaw. While success in commodification of our innovative work is not out of reach, it is relatively rare. When we talk about technology transfer, our first inclination is to frame the process as a traditional commercial pipeline. In this model, technologies are moved into the competitive marketplace and thence to consumers via a complex route, positioning the technology at one end of a business plan and a hypothetical consumer at the other. There is no clear process or path to successful technology transfer, and it requires skills that technology innovators, for the most part, do not claim to have or even aspire to have. Awareness of no one way to do tech transfer does, however, allow the possibility of tweaking the model to make success more likely. Significantly, Education -- in particular -- has difficulty filling the role of a consumer at the end of this traditional model. This talk is based on interviews with ISD personnel and will begin by outlining a shared model of technology transfer. We'll talk about a possible way of reconfiguring the model to make it both more Education-friendly and more engineer-friendly. Finally, we'll present a survey of ISD technology that seems to us to hold potential for testing our reconfigured model.

Last updated: Mon Jun 19 17:44:06 2006