Challenges and Opportunities for Innovation in the Public Works ...

10 May 1992
Technology Transfer and Marketing: Army-Style
Presentation at Infrastructure Workshop - 4 Mar 1992
Champaign, IL
by
Jeffrey J. Walaszek
Technology transfer means many different things to many people. Researchers often
equate it with publishing articles on research in scholarly journals. Lawyers define it as the
development of joint agreements between research laboratories and private sector
corporations. At the U.S. Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories
(USACERL), we define it as getting our products into daily use by our many military and
nonmilitary customers. This effort is the same effort undertaken by private sector companies
trying to market their products to consumers.
We need to learn from our marketing counterparts in the private sector to improve our
ability to transfer technology. What we at USACERL are trying to do is to get people ý3 use
our products. Taking it a step further, what we're really trying to do is change people's
behavior -- to try to get our customers to stop doing things the way they're used to doing
them and instead doing it our way. In order to change behavior we first need to change
attitudes.
This paper will examine the barriers to adoption, provide an overview of a technology
management approach in the Army, and discuss a marketing approach to technology transfer
used by the Army.
Barriers to Adoption
The transfer of infrastructure research into use poses a challenge uncommon to most
government organizations. The challenge is to integrate new technologies into the daily
activities of the wide variety of public and private sector organizations involved in
infrastructure activities.
The literature provides a wide offering of reasons for the failure of efforts to transfer
technology to potential users. These barriers to adoption typically fall into three general
areas: ineffective communication, human resistance to change, and organizational and industry
constraints.
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