Technology Transfer

Technology transfer between federal laboratories and industry is increasingly viewed as a major factor contributing to the economic strength and competitiveness of the United States. In 1986, Congress sought to enhance the effectiveness of this transfer by authorizing cooperative research and development agreements as another form of technology transfer. This report compares the Energy Department's (DOE) process for implementing cooperative research and development agreements to the approaches used by the Army and the National Institute of Standards and Technology to determine why some federal laboratories had entered into more agreements than DOE's laboratories.

GAO found that: (1) in response to concerns over unauthorized access to secret technologies and contractor oversight, DOE has developed a highly centralized, cooperative R&D agreement approval process to fund most of its collaborative R&D efforts; (2) while DOE relies on a centralized approval process, NIST and Army laboratories rely on local expertise and resources to approve their R&D agreements; (3) there is insufficient information to determine whether the DOE approval process is more effective than decentralized approaches for improving U.S. industry competitiveness; (4) although the DOE process has fostered many cooperative R&D efforts and reduced duplicative R&D efforts, the process may have limited the number of cooperative R&D agreements implemented at DOE facilities; (5) DOE approval delays may be attributable to legislative requirements requiring separate DOE reviews and approvals; (6) DOE has improved its cooperative agreement implementation process, taken steps to facilitate the approval process, and allowed laboratories to make more implementation decisions locally; and (7) DOE needs to continue to enhance technology transfer at DOE laboratories, continue to search for ways to make its approval process more flexible so that laboratories can conduct cooperative R&D agreements when resources are available, evaluate the impact of ongoing agreements to determine what techniques are most productive, and discuss its cooperative agreement strategy with private industry and academia.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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