Book Review
So you want to set up a technology evaluation program?
Theodore F Schoenborn
1997; 65 pages; Jean M Fredette;
Phillip Franks
This workbook on 'Technology Nomination, Screening, Selection and Evaluation from the RIB-IT Programs' was designed by the NASA Regional Tech Transfer Center and Federal Laboratories Consortium (FLC) to facilitate commercial evaluation by third parties of technologies available from US Federal laboratories and their contractors across the USA.
It has been written to capture the methodologies currently employed in two US Federal programs (RIB-IT 1 and RIB-IT 2) to mine defense-related technology resources with potential for commercialization. The workbook is aimed at people in the FLC and the six US Regional Technology Transfer Centers, who participate in an annual trawl for technologies - an initiative named the Re-Invention Initiative Between Industry and Technology (RIBIT). Despite its relatively narrow target audience, the workbook does deal with many of the issues of project evaluation and commercialization that crop up generally in R&D portfolio management, technology scale-up and economic feasibility studies.
Strategy
In the two RIBIT programs undertaken by the time of writing the workbook, close to 1000 technologies had been evaluated over a 2 year period. To cope with such a large number of projects and a wide range of technologies, a staged approach to their evaluation was adopted. As the authors point out, 'You have to kiss a lot of frogs to find a Prince'.
Three stages of increasing detail and duration of technology evaluation are specified. The first stage is an initial scoring process which aims essentially at capturing the key characteristics of some hundreds of technologies. In the RIBIT 1 campaign for example, 409 technologies were scored with only 122 passing through to the second stage evaluation. The scoring of each project takes only 15-20 minutes. This stage is a useful first step in considering potential commercial winners.
The second stage of the evaluation process, called RIBIT VIEW, looks in much greater detail at the technical merit, potential markets and licensees, with an estimated 20 hours spent on each project. In RIBIT 1, 12 technologies progressed to the final detailed analysis stage resulting in a 'Long Evaluation and Analysis for Partnership' (LEAP) Report. The estimated time to analyze a technology for the LEAP Report was 144 hours.
Initial scoring of projects
Being a workbook, this publication provides a number of sample letters calling for nominations of technology, with the emphasis being on identifying the nature of the technology (electronic, chemical, food, etc), the patent status, and the location and ownership of the IP rights. The authors also recommend establishing a database to capture these details and provide an example of a data entry form.
A pro-forma for ranking the projects is provided. Ranking is based on a score from 1 to 5 in each of 5 categories: Commercialization potential, Development status, Patent status, Commercial markets, Size and growth of markets. For each category the workbook provides definitions for each score to reduce subjectivity.
RIBIT VIEW
The 2nd stage or RIBIT VIEW is described as a snapshot of the commercial potential for an invention. This analysis results in a 4-6 page report with standard sections or headings and very useful questions to be answered under each heading. This report is meant to 'point to the technologies with the greatest commercial promise'.
For technologists with a scientific focus, the checklist of questions would provide a valuable guide to real world criteria for a successful technology.
LEAP Report
The 3rd stage or LEAP Report focuses in on the most innovative products or processes, potential commercial partners and IP details. Again the workbook provides a sample structure for this detailed report. Each of the seven sections of the report (Technology summary, Technology owner, Technology overview, Marketing analysis, Potential commercialization plan, Marketing plan and Potential partners contains up to 19 questions or headings to guide the user in a comprehensive analysis of the path to market. An eighth and optional section addresses financial planning, cash flow and costs to market.
This workbook concentrates on the process of screening a large number of technologies that have already been developed and are sitting in a laboratory somewhere waiting to be discovered. This is perhaps an unusual situation in organizations which do their own directed R&D, but each of the stages mentioned in the workbook can be applied to R&D management.
Consider for example a company with limited internal R&D resources and which relies on harvesting technology developed by third parties and out-sources some of its strategic R&D.
The need exists for such an organization to keep abreast of the latest developments and IP ownership in various technologies. The information must be readily available, in a common format and be simple to understand. Although not particularly sophisticated, such a data base and ranking system are useful for summarizing the R&D portfolio, be it internal or a combination of internal and out-sourced projects.
Similarly the RIBIT VIEW report provides the sort of information necessary in assessing new project funding proposals, dealing as it does just with the technology to be developed, but with the competitive environment (alternative technologies) and commercial potential (market size and potential barriers to market success).
Finally, the LEAP Report provides a good framework for determining the optimum route for commercializing a technology. For most technical projects there comes a time when a decision to introduce a large step increase in expenditure must be made. It may be at the point of scaling up (capital expenditure) to industrial scale, entry into long regulatory trials (prolonged cash burn phase), establishment of a patent position or licensing negotiations (potential to give away too much for too little), but the need to manage the risk is the same.
The workbook's 5 page checklist of questions in the LEAP Report is a valuable guide to the assessment of risk. Indeed, the workbook is worth reading for industrial R&D managers for this checklist alone, if for no other reason.
Contact:
Texas Engineering Extension Services for more information or copies of the workbook or any of the NASA-sponsored Regional Technology Transfer Centers (RTTC's).
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