Research to market/public good: Economic perspectives

Abstract

Ralph Hardy outlines methods for science/technology transfer to market to achieve public good. He provided public- and private-sector examples of venture capital for early commercialization of agricultural science and technology. Hardy emphasized that licens­ing income is likely to be relatively small and that the objective of technology transfer should be to maximize public good not to maximize financial gain to the institutional “home” of the invention. Evaluations by and of technology-transfer offices should use the public-good metric, not the income metric.