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follow the fortunes of that industry. Recnt criticism of MIT's Industrial Liaison Program points
to possible difficulties with widely base foreign corprate memberships.
This summar of issues helps to set the context for the following discussion of speific
tehnology trsfer and intellectual property management mechanism in ocography, as
exemplified by WHOI and other institutions.
Technology Transfer: Policies and Practices
There is great varety in the mechanisms of technology trsfer, and we cannot claim to be
inclusive of every mechanism in this paper. Our objective is to describe a number of successful
mechanisms that have been or might be use in the field of ocography. Figure 1 shows a
schema of tehnology trsfer mechanisms in a simplified form speificaly for WHO!.
For our discussion, we model these mechanisms as linkages (agreements or other interactions)
between commercial firms and resech institutions. Non-profit resech institutions or
universities are represented as rectagles, government sources of sponsored resech as diamonds,
and commercial firms as circles. Linkages are shown as line segments or arows between
institutions. The most importt form of technology trsfer at a nonprofit resech institution
is the publication of reseach results, represente by an arow emerging from the bottom of the
WHOI box. Beuse this does not involve explicit links with industr, we ignore it in our
discussion with the reaization of potentially being misleading. A discussion of the other
mechanisms follows.
WHOI is an extraordinar institution, one which shares characteristics of other resech
institutions but canot be "pigeonholed" as either a typica nonprofit resech institution (such
as Battelle), a university (such as MIT, or a Federally Funded R&D Center (FFRDC, such as
MITR). Neverteless, it comes closest to resembling a university, and many useful
lessons can
be leaed from the extensive literature that has been written about university-industry
relationships.
Outside Professional Activities (OPAs), OPAs are an importt and widely-used channel for
interaction of academic and resech staff with commercial ventures. These activities include
serving on corpration boards and advisory committes to corprations, and external consulting
argements. The consultat acts independently, not as an official institution representative, and
recives income from the consulting work for personal gain. Consulting ca be very lucrative,
representing a significat porton of the income of some faculty and resech staff at universities.
WHOI permits staf members to underte consulting and places no upper limit on the amount
of time spent on this outside activity. (An unwritten rulehas been that consulting activities
which tae up more than 40 percent of a staff member's time wil be considered inappropriate.)
WHOI requires all staff to report annually on their outside professional activities in order to
identify potential conflcts of interest.
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