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Blog Category: Small Business Innovation Research

Lab to Market: When One Plus One Equals Three

Lab to Market: When One Plus One Equals Three

Guest blog post by Paul R. Zielinski, MS, MBA, Director, Technology Partnerships Office, National Institute of Standards and Technology & Chair, Federal Laboratory Consortium for Technology Transfer

When you want a plant to grow, you provide water, light, and fertilizer.   When you want an economy to grow you provide capital, labor, and innovation.

In today’s global markets, companies that don’t innovate generally don’t survive for long.  To keep your current customers and earn new ones, you must continually look for ways to be faster, cheaper, better . . .  or all three. 

At the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) we specialize in helping industry find those “Wow!” innovation ideas that create jobs and raise everyone’s standard of living.

We do this in lots of ways under  an approach  we call lab to market. We develop new measurement tools and standards to make sure new products can be measured fairly against established ones. We advance basic science to enable new technologies. And we work collaboratively with industry researchers in our laboratories to help them bring new research tools and knowledge back to their companies to be commercialized into new products.

We also have another tool for fueling innovation at small businesses, seed money. Commerce is one of 11 agencies with extramural research and development funding that makes awards to small businesses through the Small Business Innovation Research Program(SBIR) to perform research supporting the agency’s mission.  Awards can also be made to businesses to commercialize innovations, including innovations already developed by federal research and development programs. 

For example, at NIST, Phase I grants through SBIR provide up to $100,000 over six months to demonstrate that a proposed research effort is feasible and likely to successfully advance a commercially promising technology. NIST is currently seeking applications for SBIR awardsthat address specific technologies in a wide range of fields including advanced manufacturing, climate change and clean energy, cybersecurity, health care, and bioscience.

Tech Week 2014: Optimizing Patent Examiner Training through Volunteer Experts

Tech Week 2014: Optimizing Patent Examiner Training through Volunteer Experts

The first week in December, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) held Tech Week, an opportunity for representatives from corporations, universities, and other organizations to showcase innovations in their field for its patent examiners. Such training, part of its Patent Examiner Technical Training Program, (PETTP) helps ensure patent examiners truly understand the state of the art in the technologies and disciplines in which they consider granting patents.  The technologists, scientists, engineers, and other experts in the PETTP volunteer their assistance. 

PETTP responds to one of several executive actions issued by the White House earlier this year aimed, in part, at strengthening the quality and accessibility of our patent system. One of these initiatives focused on the critical need for examiners to stay up-to-date in their technical fields of expertise through more robust technical training, enabling them to perform the best examination possible. PETTP improves the patent process by ensuring patent examiners are aware of emerging trends, maturing technologies, and recent innovation. 

Topics during USPTO Tech Week included technology advancements and trends in the areas of stem cells, petroleum, regenerative medicine, pharmaceuticals, robotics, financial trading, wireless communication technology, and more. Among the many presenters were representatives from Qualcomm, Novartis Pharmaceuticals, iRobot, Google, Seiko Epson, Sun Chemical, Verizon, and NASA. 

Program Manager Ray Taylor of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) discussed the innovative technologies developed for this large, infrared telescope slated for launch in 2018. JWST will observe some of the most distant objects in the universe, the formation of stars and planets, and give insight into the Big Bang, the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, and the evolution of our own solar system. Taylor explained the unique challenges JWST faces, such as developing a strong yet lightweight primary mirror 100 times more powerful than the Hubble Telescope. This was accomplished by building mirror segments out of ultra-lightweight beryllium, in a way that folds up to fit into a spacecraft and adjusts to shape after launch. Overcoming operational challenges related to temperature, such as mirror deformation and alignment, were also outlined for patent examiners. Taylor received a multitude of questions, leading to a robust discussion on the telescope’s development.