Yesterday I had the privilege to go to Washington to participate in a White House policy briefing. The highlight was a conversation I had with Aneesh Chopra, who is President Obama’s Chief Technology Officer. The ideas discussed regarding technology transfer of university and government-based federally funded R&D were intriguing. And I will be following up with him and others in the Administration in the weeks ahead.
One topic that is specific to AUTM is a new prize to recognize successful university-based commercialization activities. Jointly offered by the Coulter Foundation, NSF, and AAAS, this prize “will be used to identify and promote incentives to adopt best practices that improve university commercialization efforts.” AUTM will connect with the organizers of this competition to determine how AUTM as an organization can support this effort.
You can read more about the NSF-Coulter-AAAS prize here: http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2011/0916nsf_prize.shtml
And you can read more about this and the other meetings I had in D.C. on the Fuentek blog: http://bit.ly/rmI4cu
Have a good weekend!