National Academies Press: OpenBook

Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology (1999)

Chapter: Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application

« Previous: 5 Recommendations
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Appendixes

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
This page in the original is blank.
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Appendix A Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application

To gain a better understanding of the capitalization process, the working group examined a number of specific fields of research and application during the course of the study. In several of these cases, a workshop or expert panel discussion was organized and a write-up was prepared on the basis of discussion and background research. The experts who participated in the discussion and others were asked to review the draft write-ups for accuracy. In other cases, the working group prepared write-ups based on telephone interviews with experts and a survey of the relevant literature. The working group has worked to ensure that the write-ups give an accurate picture of a given field, but they inevitably reflect the insights and opinions of the individual experts consulted. In several cases, the working group worked closely with other Academy complex units in organizing the workshops and preparing the write-ups.

The working group was only able to cover a limited number of fields and did not attempt a comprehensive assessment of capitalization across all fields in every country. Through experimentation, the working group found that the examination of well-defined subfields and specific applications (e.g., speech recognition and monoclonal antibodies) generated more useful insights than the study of broader fields (e.g., computer science and biology). The examples were selected through consultation among working group and COSEPUP members, staff, and other experts.

The working group looked for examples in which success and failure, and the causes of each, could be determined clearly. This proved to be difficult. In most of the examples, a closer examination showed elements of both success and failure. In some instances the success factors and barriers to capitalization were fairly clear; in others, causality was difficult to establish.

The examples illustrate a number of important issues related to capitalizing, and are referenced throughout the report. The examples, along with the existing literature that the working group reviewed on topics such as innovation and technology transfer, provided the raw material for the framework of the study, the conclusions, and recommendations. Write-ups of the examples are provided in this appendix and in Box 3-1. Table A-1 summarizes the examples and insights.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Table A-1 Capitalization in Specific Fields Examined During the Study

Field [Source of information]

U.S. Standing in Research

Capitalization Situation and Trends

Key Points for the Study

Catalysis [workshops, background research]

*The United States is performing at the frontier

*The chemical industry has long been characterized by intense global competition. Companies in the United States, Europe, and Japan are effective at capitalizing on research wherever it appears.

*It appears that in this field U.S. industry is cutting back on long-term work

 

*U.S. universities have become world leaders in a number of subfields over the past 15 years

*New opportunities are emerging to apply catalysis in advanced materials and more environmentally

*Confirms the value of working at the frontier in a global industry.

 

*Integration of research and education is seen as a U.S. advantage.

*Some experts are concerned that, despite a growing commonality of interests, U.S. academia and industry appear to find it easier to work with foreign partners than with each other in these promising areas.

*Industry-university differences in perspective emerged over how to promote effective collaboration

 

*U.S. petrochemical companies have cut back on research in some areas

 

*Several discussants highlighted the excellence in U.S. advanced education, but raised questions over whether students understand industry problems.

 

*Excellent academic and industrial research in Europe.

 

*Government plays a smaller role in this field relative to others examined in the report.

 

 

 

*Start-up companies play a smaller role in this field than in several others examined.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Field [Source of information]

U.S. Standing in Research

Capitalization Situation and Trends

Key Points for the Study

Application of research on cognition and learning to education [interviews, literature survey]

*The United States appears to be working at the frontier.

*It is inherently difficult to translate research findings into real curricula and teaching practices, and to test new approaches.

*Unlike some of the other examples, there are few examples of success, and few established capitalization pathways.

 

*National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, National Institutes of Health, and private foundations support relevant research.

*Some work aimed at capitalization in this area is going on, but the scale of effort is not large.

*The policy environment for capitalization is not particularly supportive, and the research community itself is somewhat fragmented

 

*A number of experts consulted believe that research has produced insights that could be applied successfully in classrooms.

*Capitalizing requires cooperation between researchers, education schools, teachers, and school districts, but incentives to collaborate are weak.

 

 

 

*It is well known that other countries outperform the United States in K-12, but it is unclear whether any of this gap is due to more effective capitalization abroad.

 

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Field [Source of information]

U.S. Standing in Research

Capitalization Situation and Trends

Key Points for the Study

Bioinformatics [workshop, commissioned paper]

*The United States appears to be at the frontier in this rapidly emerging field. International companies are ramping up research activities in the United States.

*The data produced by the Human Genome Project and related efforts is proving valuable to pharmaceutical research much more rapidly than anticipated.

*Although the U.S. appears to be doing as well or better than other countries, this example raises serious future questions about how we invest in human capital.

 

*At the same time that many Ph.D. holders in the life sciences appear to be underemployed. there is a shortage of people combining experimental expertise and computer skills. This may emerge as a barrier to both long-term progress in research and capitalization.

*Utilization of engineering approaches to the study of relationships between gene expression and disease promises to deliver many new therapies.

*The life sciences are more insulated from nonacademic labor market demand than most other fields.

 

 

*U.S. mobility between academia and industry is an advantage in capitalization, but we may be eating our academic seed corn.

*It has been difficult so far to establish new interdisciplinary programs in this field.

Liquid crystals displays [interviews, background research]

*The original discovery of liquid crystals was made in Austria in the 19th century.

*Widespread applications of LCDs emerged in the calculator and watch businesses in the 1970's, with Japanese and U.S. firms both involved.

*Even in this area, where other countries have taken the subsequent lead in commercialization, the United States was first in reducing fundamental understanding to practice.

 

*Key developments in liquid crystal materials were made in England in the 1960's.

*Today, the largest market for LCDs is in portable computers.

*Illustrates Japanese strengths in improving technologies developed abroad and creating new applications.

 

*The first prototype LCD was developed at RCA's Sarnoff Lab in the United States.

*Japanese firms emerged as leaders in the 1980s because of focus on incremental improvements, cost, and manufacturability.

 

 

 

*Korean firms have entered the LCD business.

 

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Field [Source of information]

U.S. Standing in Research

Capitalization Situation and Trends

Key Points for the Study

Monoclonal antibodies [workshop, background research]

*The fundamental breakthrough by Köhler and Milstein was made in Britian.

*Development of human diagnostics and therapeutics has been pioneered by U.S. start-ups.

*Illustrates the importance of working at the frontier to capitalize on foreign science.

 

*The United States has produced many subsequent research gains.

*There were capitalization setbacks in the early 1990's, when several septic shock therapies were not successful.

*Illustrates the importance of venture capital, university-industry collaboration, and the scientist-entrepreneur as important U.S. strengths.

 

 

*More recently, several therapies have proven successful. Monoclonal antibodies remain an important area in the biotechnology industry.

 

Network systems [workshop]

*The United States appears to enjoy clear leadership in many areas.

*Taking into account all areas of networking, this is an enormous, growing market.

*Illustrates the serendipitous spin-off benefits of government mission-related investments.

 

*Government investment in the Internet and related areas has played a major role.

*U.S.-based companies are the leaders in capitalization.

*Illustrates the importance of venture capital and engineer-entrepreneurs as U.S. strengths.

 

*Applications and commercialization are moving so rapidly that it is difficult to interest talented people in more fundamental areas of research.

 

*Illustrates the possible problems of imbalance between long-term and short-term research investments.

 

*Ironically, government investment in fundamental research is seen to be lagging, partly because of the rapid growth in market success for U.S. companies.

 

*Illustrates the shortening time horizons of U.S. industry.

 

*A number of the prominent U.S. companies do not do research, just product development.

 

 

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Field [Source of information]

U.S. Standing in Research

Capitalization Situation and Trends

Key Points for the Study

Numerical-control machine tools [background research]

*The original breakthrough was made at MIT on an Air Force contract.

*While capitalization in the United States focused on higher-end defense applications, Japanese companies developed lower-cost applications of NC technology in general-purpose tools.

*Illustrates the effectiveness of Japanese institutions that acquire, diffuse, and improve technology, such as industry associations.

 

 

 

*Illustrates challenges to the United States to capitalize in fields requiring incremental improvement over the long-term.

Optical sensing [workshop]

*The focus of the discussion was on fiber optic sensors. This is an interdisciplinary and somewhat fragmented field, where applied work is targeted at particular needs.

*Optical sensors have a number of advantages for specific applications, but have not emerged in a large commercial market.

*Participants credited the SBIR program with making important contributions to capitalization efforts by smaller U.S. companies.

 

*The United States is clearly ahead in areas where there is significant funding, such as space and health care applications. The United States also publishes more papers. One expert believed that Europe might be ahead overall, however.

*In some areas it has been difficult to reach cost-performance levels necessary to displace older technologies in established applications.

*Concern was expressed that U.S. government funding is becoming too focused on applications work with short time horizons.

 

 

*Both small and large companies play important roles.

*Participants expressed the view that greater familiarity by students with industry needs would enhance U.S. ability to capitalize.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Field [Source of information]

U.S. Standing in Research

Capitalization Situation and Trends

Key Points for the Study

Oxygen steelmaking [background research]

*The process was developed in Austria, but was widely available worldwide through licensing.

*Capitalization on this technology was an important factor in Japan's emergence as a leader in the global steel industry during the 1960's and 1970's.

*Illustrates the Japanese government's role in facilitating foreign technology acquisition during the high-growth period.

 

 

*The Japanese government coordinated licensing of the technology, and encouraged collaboration in developing generic technology. Firms competed in implementation.

 

 

 

*U.S. companies did not capitalize as effectively, and fell seriously behind in the steel industry.

 

Piezoelectric ceramics [workshop]

*Most groundbreaking work has been done in the United States, funded by the DoD and performed at U.S. universities.

*Applications are in actuation and sensing in a number of areas.

*Illustrates that U.S. advantages in venture capital, flexible human resources, and strong government research support do not translate into capitalization success in all fields. In fields with low margins, a significant existing infrastructure, and a need for incremental improvement, Japanese companies are still formidable.

 

*Japanese companies that manufacture ultrasonic imaging machines are also supporting long-term work.

*U.S. companies lead in the military and mission-critical applications supported by government funding (Hubble Telescope).

 

 

 

*Commercial applications in large markets are emerging, such as in hard disk drive manufacturing. Japanese companies appear better positioned to capitalize.

 

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Field [Source of information]

U.S. Standing in Research

Capitalization Situation and Trends

Key Points for the Study

Speech recognition [workshop]

*Speech recognition has been a focus of long-term government and industry research support since the 1960's.

*Despite progress in fundamental research over many years, speech recognition did not find its way into applications until the 1980s.

*Large U.S. companies are more focused on results and products than previously. In this field the shift has produced benefits.

 

*The United States is working at the frontier, and has more extensive activity. Europe and Japan also have well-funded programs.

*Capitalization appears to be accelerating, and occurring fastest in the United States.

*As in other rapidly growing fields in information technology, there is a problem of retaining some of the best talent in academia.

 

 

*The increased power and lower cost of computer hardware and other external factors contributed to capitalization.

*Illustrates that long-term efforts, a combination of progress in a range of fields, and a period of "research gestation" may be required for capitalization to occur.

Fuzzy logic [interviews, background research]

*The United States produced the first breakthrough. Research communities in Europe and Japan embraced this work, and now excellent research is ongoing around the world.

*First applied by European and Japanese companies in industrial controls, transportation systems, and home appliances.

*A rare example of a U.S. research advance first reduced to practice and commercialized abroad.

 

*A substantial group in the U.S. research and applications community believes that the benefits claimed for fuzzy logic are easier to come by using traditional logic.

*Slowly being applied by global U.S.-based companies.

 

Applications of economics: options pricing and spectrum auctions [interviews, background research]

*U.S. academic economists produced the relevant breakthroughs.

*Research in both fields was first utilized in the United States.

*Economics research is not a top priority of national policy, but the field has generated a number of advances that have been capitalized on over the years.

 

 

*Economics research does have established pathways for capitalization by financial services firms and policy makers.

 

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Monoclonal Antibodies

Antibodies are soluble proteins produced by the immune system in response to potentially harmful antigens such as viruses and bacteria (Haber, 1996). They bind to specific antigens and help to destroy them. Antibodies to even a single antigen are highly diverse and heterogeneous, produced by many different types of cells. Some antibodies, once activated by a disease, help to provide continuing resistance to that disease. This characteristic makes it possible to develop vaccines, which consist of killed or weakened bacteria or viruses that stimulate the production of antibodies against those antigens (Biotechnology Industry Organization, 1989).

For many years, scientists tried to produce antibodies in pure form. As part of their research on the genetic basis of antibody diversity, Georges Köhler and Cesar Milstein developed a method of producing large amounts of pure, monoclonal antibodies (MAb), in 1975 (Raiten and Berman, 1993). In this method, tumor cells that reproduce endlessly are combined through cell fusion with mammalian cells that produce an antibody. The resulting line of fused cells, or hybridoma, are immortalized and produce only one type of antibody. Köhler and Milstein won the Nobel Prize in 1984 for this work.

The discovery of MAb technology has been a boon to research and public health, although at various times, expectations have been higher than what could be delivered in the short-term. MAb/hybridoma research and applications, both past history and current trends, illustrate a number of the strengths and issues for the United States and its ability to capitalize on research leadership, particularly in biotechnology and biomedical fields.

Initial applications and commercialization

Although Köhler and Milstein had done their work in Great Britain, the strong U.S. research base in immunology was quickly able to understand the implications of the discovery and begin developing applications. Much of this work was done in universities and was funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other government agencies. Close collaboration between small high-technology start-up companies and universities characterizes commercial biotechnology in the United States. The U.S. environment for research and commercialization also allowed for relatively free movement of skilled researchers from universities to industry, and for the recruitment of experienced managers for start-up operations.

One prominent example of the importance of university-industry collaboration and "people linkages" is Centocor, Inc., and its founder, Hubert J. P. Schoemaker. Schoemaker immigrated from the Netherlands and received a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He then went to work for the medical products group at Corning Glass Works (now Corning, Inc.), which was using polyclonal antibodies for diagnostic applications (H. J. P. Schoemaker, Centocor, personal communication, November 1996). Schoemaker's scientific and business background provided good preparation for launching a

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

company to commercialize MAb research done at universities. Centocor also was able to attract seasoned managers from other health care companies.

Since polyclonal antibodies already were being used for diagnostics, utilizing MAb as a superior technology for in vitro diagnostics was fairly obvious, and was the first commercial application of the technology. Relative to polyclonal antibodies, tests utilizing MAb are more accurate and cost-effective. By introducing the antibody with a radioactive or chemical "tag" into a blood sample, the amount of antigen can be measured according to how much antibody binds with the antigen. Regulatory approval of in vitro diagnostic products is not as long or as costly as human therapeutics and in vivo diagnostics, and so, products appeared quickly.

MAb technology is still widely used in diagnostics.1 In addition to Centocor, which initially focused on cancer diagnostics, several other companies such as Hybritech and Genetic Systems were formed around the same time and commenced work in this area. Current diagnostic uses of MAb besides cancer are in blood typing, diagnosis of AIDS, transplantation technology, pregnancy testing, and screening for influenza, measles, malaria, herpes, and toxoplasmosis. Taken together, these applications of MAb have made a significant contribution to public health. The ability to ensure the safety of the blood supply in the wake of the appearance of HIV is one outstanding example (Raiten and Berman, 1993).

Therapeutic applications

Therapeutic applications of antibodies have been pursued for over a century. In 1895, Hericourt and Richet described the first trials in which cancer cells were injected into animals to raise antiserum for treating cancer patients (Cambridge University Molecular Biology, 1996). Although several patients showed promising results through treatment with tailored antiserum, repeated trials during the early 1900s led to results that were inconsistent and contradictory, and this line of research was dropped.

With the development of MAb technology, hopes were raised that "magic bullet" therapies for a number of diseases would be near at hand. Therapeutic development thus far has focused on treatment of tumors, neutralization of toxins and drugs in overdose, receptor blockade, inhibition of hormones or cytokines, and immunosuppression (Haber, 1996).

Development of therapeutic agents presents several additional challenges not present in the development of diagnostics. New drugs must go through several phases of clinical trials designed to establish their safety and efficacy before they can be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Further, therapeutic applications of MAb require far greater amounts of antibody than diagnostic applications. These development and manufacturing challenges require a longer time horizon and higher levels of investment than diagnostics development. On the other hand, the potential market for therapeutics is far larger than that for diagnostics.

1.  

Besides therapeutics, discussed in the next section, work has been done to apply MAb technology to in vivo imaging, but the advantages over alternative technologies have not been compelling.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Private equity, mainly in the form of venture capital, has played a key role in the financing of companies developing MAb therapeutics and other biotechnology products. Of the 1,500 U.S. biotechnology firms that existed in 1996, about 450 were venture backed, and these firms represent over 85 percent of the patents awarded, scientific research published, and drugs approved (Lerner, 1996). Although venture capital accounted for less than 20 percent of the $37 billion in external financing raised by biotechnology firms over the 1978-1995 period, venture-backed firms have raised 90 percent of the total. Venture investments have served a screening and validating function that facilitates access to other sources of funding.

Biotechnology poses particular problems for venture investors because of uncertainties and risks related to evaluating the underlying science, intellectual property risks from patent positions and the inability to use trade secrets in most cases, and business risks hinging on the management abilities of entrepreneurs (Lerner, 1996).

Still, biotechnology has been an attractive area for venture investment. Perhaps one reason is the potential market for biotechnology products, particularly therapeutics that attack serious diseases. Several companies developed MAb therapies to treat septic shock during the late 1980s and early 1990s, raising sufficient funding through venture capital, public offerings, and other mechanisms to support the costs of development. Septic shock sometimes occurs as a postoperative complication and often is fatal. Ultimately, none of these drugs gained approval in the United States.

Future prospects and issues

Work has continued on MAb therapeutics in recent years, with some notable successes. For example, the Centocor-developed ReoPro® (abciximab) reduces acute ischemic cardiac complications in patients undergoing or about to undergo angioplasty procedures, and has been on the market for several years.

As for the future, perhaps the most interesting developments are in the cancer area (R. Levy, Stanford University, personal communication, October 1996). One of the first experimental applications of MAb therapy was the development of an antibody specific to the B-cell lymphoma receptor in the tumor of a particular patient in 1981 by Ronald Levy. The antibody effectively attacked the tumor, and the patient is free of disease today. Further research showed that this customized approach produces similarly good results about 10 percent of the time, and established the principle of monoclonal antibody therapeutics. However, scaling up and refining the process of locating the antibody and producing it in sufficient quantities, and gaining FDA approval, has not been judged to be a promising enough business opportunity to attract significant investment.

Several MAb cancer therapies are already on the market or in later stage development, including a treatment for non-Hodgkin's lymphoma developed by IDEC, a San Diego-based company, and a treatment for postoperative colorectal cancer developed by Centocor. Other companies, such as Coulter, are active in developing MAb cancer therapeutics.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Research on future therapies is proceeding along several lines. For example, some work is focused on the development of immunotoxins or antibodies hooked up to toxins to attack cancer. The antibodies guide the toxin to the tumors and lymphomas. Anecdotal results of trials thus far are positive. Also, work is also being done on linking antibodies to radioactive substances to treat leukemia and other cancers.

Despite the promise of current research, it has been difficult to raise financial support for the development of cancer therapeutics based on MAb, particularly for start-up companies. Although cancer treatment is a very large market, proving efficacy, refining the manufacturing process, and gaining approval can be a long and expensive process. New MAb treatments can be more expensive to test than traditional chemical and radiation therapies. Most of the investment in this area is coming from large pharmaceutical companies and more established biotechnology firms.

Conclusion and summary

The monoclonal antibodies case illustrates (1) the value to the United States of being among the leaders in all fields of science because this position allowed U.S. universities and companies to capitalize quickly on a major breakthrough abroad, to the benefit of U.S. public health and the economy; (2) the advantages of U.S. approaches to advanced education and training that attract talented scientists from abroad and allow for the accumulation of diverse experience through movement between universities and companies; and (3) the positive impact of financial and intellectual property practices that allow university-based research advances to be commercialized. The case also raises possible challenges, such as whether investment decisions reflect an adequate or current understanding of scientific developments.

Speech Recognition

The development of computers that can recognize human speech has been pursued in the United States by the computer science research community, computer and telecommunications companies, and government funding agencies since the 1960s. Speech recognition would hold obvious advantages over keyboards and other input mechanisms in advanced applications of information technology, and persistent efforts have gone into research over many years. Real-world products reached the market during the 1980s, and applications are expanding rapidly. Speech recognition is a good illustration of more general shifts that are occurring in the U.S. research and development (R&D) system. It also shows how capitalizing on research in a particular area may depend on research developments in other areas, as well as factors outside of research, such as the market environment.

Research

Current speech recognition systems have three major components (Figure A-1). The first task is feature extraction, which involves digitizing the sounds of speech

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Figure A-1.

Source: Abeer Alwan.

and extracting the energy and frequency data. The second step is pattern comparison, in which digitized speech is compared with a vocabulary stored in memory. Most systems now use models of phonemes (often context-dependent models are used), the smallest identifiable sounds in a language, rather than complete words.2 Speech patterns are compared with the models using a statistical technique called hidden Markov modeling, which calculates the probability that a sequence of such stored models, which form a word according to a task dictionary (or lexicon), matches the spoken word. The final step is the application of a language model to enforce basic rules of grammar and syntax on the recognized output sentence. The system selects the word sequence (or sentence) with the highest probability that is consistent with the task language model.

AT&T Labs, Bell Laboratories, IBM, and other industrial labs have conducted research on speech recognition for many years. Basic research on speech recognition, along with artificial intelligence and other advanced information technologies, has received government support by the intelligence community and by Department of Defense (DoD) through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Institute for Defense Analysis, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and other intramural and extramural mechanisms. DARPA traditionally has provided support for research on large-vocabulary speech recognition tasks with

2.  

For example, there are 44 phonemes in English. See Koprowski (1996).

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

potential military applications. A recent focus has been interdisciplinary approaches integrating language models and human-computer interface issues (Alwan, 1996). In recent years, the National Science Foundation (NSF) also has emerged as a significant supporter of basic research in speech recognition, and provides funding at about one-tenth the level of DARPA. One of NSF's current focuses is human-centered systems, or speech recognition applications in areas such as educational technology.

DARPA funding has produced several major advances in speech recognition research, such as advanced search architectures, integrated systems, and speaker independent systems (Cohen, 1996). U.S. government support has served to train researchers, has balanced knowledge sharing and competition, and drives a great deal of useful research. Experts consulted by COSEPUP generally rated the United States as at least among the leaders in speech recognition research. European and Japanese efforts are well funded and evaluated quite highly.

However, the strength of U.S. research efforts, by themselves, was not sufficient to produce practical commercial systems. A number of difficulties encountered in applying speech recognition in real-life situations have acted as barriers to widespread utilization. For example, it is difficult for systems to recognize continuous speech, and to reliably recognize words spoken with different accents and pronunciations or spoken in noisy backgrounds. Providing systems with enough robustness to handle realistic speech has not been a focus of basic research efforts. Although system benchmarking efforts have been a useful tool for the research community, lab systems that have performed well on benchmarking tests have not achieved the same performance in the field (Cohen, 1996).

Other enabling factors

Several developments external to research have spurred the emergence of practical commercial speech recognition systems in recent years. One important factor has been the continuous cost and performance improvement in computer hardware over the past decade, particularly more powerful microprocessors and cheaper memory. Greater processing power allows the components of the speech recognition system to work more quickly, especially given the fact that the speech and language models are both computationally- and memory-intensive. It is now possible for speech recognition systems to work in real time on modern-day personal computers (PCs). Current PC-based speech recognition systems are accurate and cost-effective enough to be widely used in several specialized markets, such as transcription of medical or legal reports, and as the primary input mechanism for PCs used by the physically challenged.

A second factor has been the emergence of market pressures and opportunities that have provided impetus for commercial systems. One important example is in telecommunications applications (Rabiner, 1996). With the breakup of the Bell System in the early 1980s and the resulting intense competition in the U.S. long-distance market, telephone companies have a strong incentive to automate calling and customer service functions to the extent possible. Telephone companies now

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

are relying on speech recognition systems with small vocabularies that are very robust in their ability to recognize speech from speakers with a large range of accents and pronunciations. As pointed out above, AT&T Labs has been a leader in speech recognition research for many years. In recent years, heightened competition has resulted in an imperative to focus research on areas that can contribute to near- or medium-term product development.

Both of these trends are not unique to speech recognition and can be seen in other areas of information technology research and applications. Early in the development of computer science and the computer industry, the U.S. government, particularly DoD, played a key role in funding advanced research and education, and as the lead customer for new information technology applications (Langlois and Mowery, 1996). Particularly with the development and diffusion of the PC over the past decade and a half, the globally competitive commercial market has replaced DoD as the predominant driver of information technologies, even though government retains a critical role as a supporter of research. These trends also have affected large corporate central R&D facilities such as AT&T Labs and IBM. Speech recognition, which is making the transition from primarily a research field to a critical technology for a variety of future information technology products, provides an excellent illustration of more general shifts in the U.S. environment for capitalizing on research.

Future issues and challenges

A number of established companies and start-ups in the United States, Europe, and Japan are pursuing future applications of speech recognition and speech understanding technology. For example, refining and extending approaches used today in telecommunications will result in enhanced ability to automate purchases and reservations made by telephone. Additional telecommunications applications, such as voice dialing, voice access to messages, and even intelligent voice-controlled assistants—agents that can screen incoming calls—are also under development.

In PC-oriented applications, widespread utilization of speech recognition as a substitute for the keyboard and mouse is probably still some years away, at least in English-speaking countries. Computer companies are seeking to utilize speech recognition as a means to expand the PC market in China, where using keyboards is quite difficult. Because of the linguistic significance of tones in the spoken language, Chinese is perhaps more amenable to speech recognition than English.

The experts who shared their views with COSEPUP agreed on several important future trends and challenges for the United States in capitalizing on speech recognition research. First, it will be important to continue to sufficiently fund advanced research and education and to continue to pursue interdisciplinary research approaches. Basic research advances and the accumulation of generic knowledge can have a major impact on the performance of future commercial speech recognition systems. For example, a better understanding of speech production and perception, including how to model these processes, is an important target (Alwan, 1996).

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

At the same time, although academic researchers should not shift their efforts toward the development of products, it is necessary for researchers and students to increase their awareness of the limitations imposed by real-world conditions. The utilization of additional benchmarks to supplement the current approach, which relies heavily on word recognition accuracy, is one possible approach.

Maintaining and expanding education and training efforts also will be critical to U.S. capabilities to capitalize, since many younger academic researchers are being hired away by industry because of the expanding commercial market for speech recognition systems.

Piezoelectric Ceramics

The term piezoelectric describes materials that change shape when exposed to an electric charge, and emit a charge when exposed to a physical stress (Cross, 1996). Study of piezoelectric materials makes up one part of the broader examination of ferroelectric substances, materials whose spontaneous electric polarization is reversible by an electric field. There are two types of piezoelectric materials: single-crystal materials and polycrystalline ceramics. The focus of this discussion is on piezoelectric ceramics and ceramic composites. Ceramics are much more complicated than single-crystal piezoelectric materials, and are promising for a range of applications because of a greater ability to engineer their properties as opposed to those of single crystals. The ceramic material that is the subject of most of the experimental work and applications in this area is lead zirconate/lead titanate (PZT).

The primary applications of piezoelectric materials are sensing and actuation. Piezoelectric ceramics have several advantages over alternative mechanisms such as traditional mechanical systems (electromagnetic, hydraulic, pneumatic), resistive/ capacitative strain gauges, and optical fiber. First, because piezoelectric materials allow direct conversion between mechanical and electrical energy, no translation equipment or external power sources are necessary. Also, because PZT is highly sensitive, devices can be made very small. Further, empirical work on additives to PZT has yielded materials with modified "hard" or "soft" responses, although the theoretical explanation for how these additives work has not been established completely.

However, sensing and actuation systems using piezoelectric ceramics have some disadvantages. For example, the piezoelectric "working point" may drift with time, and it is difficult to make the materials completely stable. In addition, sensing and actuation systems using piezoelectric ceramics are subject to electromagnetic interference, possible ground-loop problems, and temperature limits.

When PZT is used in a polymer composite, complementary dielectric and elastic properties can be designed. The key elements in designing a composite are connectivity (the mode in which the phases interconnect), symmetry of the arrangement, and scale. The desired scale of the composite arrangement depends upon the wavelength of excitation.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Research motivation and leadership

Most of the groundbreaking research on piezoelectric ceramics and applications has been done in the United States. Most of this work has been funded by DoD and performed at universities. The U.S. Navy and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) have had a particular interest in developing piezoelectric materials. For example, the use of piezoelectric active mounts could contribute to submarine stealthiness by canceling mechanical vibration (NRC, 1997b). Microactuators and microsensors utilizing piezoelectric ceramics also could serve other defense-related functions, such as in "smart structures" that would reduce turbulence on airplane wings. Applications of piezoelectric ceramic sensors also have been developed in the medical field, most prominently in ultrasonic imaging.

Although excellent research is being done outside the United States, particularly by Japanese companies that manufacture ultrasonic imaging machines, the United States is still the clear leader in research in most areas and is among the leaders in a few others. One of the emerging areas of major research interest is films for micro (or mini) electromechanical systems (MEMS).3 Piezoelectric ceramics have distinct advantages because of the ability to make effective devices that are very small. Possible MEMS applications that would utilize piezoelectric ceramic components include minipumps to allow chemistry or DNA sequencing on a chip, microreactors, microinstruments such as tunneling devices and mass spectrometers on a chip, and microrobots for remote medical diagnostics and minimally invasive surgery.

In addition to leadership in research, the United States also leads in the applications of piezoelectric ceramics that have motivated government research funding. In addition to the naval and other military applications discussed earlier, these include other mission-critical applications such as actuators for space mirrors, including those utilized in the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble Telescope utilizes deformable optics, or mirrors that are bent by very small amounts of strain, and need to be tuned in service. Piezoelectric ceramic actuators can provide the small amounts of force required for this type of tuning.

What all of these mission-critical applications have in common is that the specific property of the device is valued more highly than cost (these are expensive, one-of-a-kind or low-production-run systems) and reliability (it is possible to rigorously test all components). These applications also do not have a great deal of economic impact. The United States has a strong research base in advanced materials but there is no advanced materials industry as such. In the emerging high-volume, industrial, and consumer applications of piezoelectric ceramics, Japan and perhaps other countries have advantages relative to those of the United States that may allow them to capitalize more quickly and effectively.

3.  

Some experts believe that most of the emerging applications will be in minisystems or those in the micron to millimeter scale, rather than the submicron world (Cross, 1996).

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Hard disk drive applications: Challenge to U.S. ability to capitalize

Discussion at the COSEPUP workshop focused on the application of piezoelectric ceramics in manufacturing hard disk drives (HDDs) as an example of the challenges facing the U.S. system in capitalizing (Cima, 1996). The HDD industry is growing very rapidly along with the PC market and was expected to be a $23 billion industry in 1998. Many of the leading companies are based in the United States, such as Seagate, but do a significant amount of their manufacturing overseas.

The HDD is a complicated mechanical device. At its heart is the slider, a block of ceramic material on which a sensor is mounted, which skims over the surface of the disk and helps regulate the position of the read/write heads. Over 300 million heads are made per year. Manufacturing the sliders involves a combination of ultraprecision machining and very large-scale integration. They are made from a titanium carbide-aluminum oxide composite, which comes to the manufacturer in the form of a wafer. On the surface are recording devices made of magneto-resistive thin film. The sliders are built on the wafer, and diced out.

As the market and capacity of HDDs have grown, cost and the tolerance levels of components have shrunken. The slider that faces the head needs to be manufactured to a tolerance of 150 Å and to cost less than a T-shirt. This is done through a process known as mechanical lapping. Resistant film is applied to the wafer to keep track of size, and is actively sensed during the lapping process. As differences in height along the surface of the wafer are detected, stacks of actuators adjust the shape of the polishing arm and the rate of polishing accordingly. These stack actuators use either piezoelectric ceramics or an older technology known as voice coil.

Manufacturing the stack actuators used in mechanical lapping equipment is still a fairly low volume business. The products are sold to the disk-drive makers themselves (some of whom manufacture their own equipment) or independent equipment vendors. However, this is a very important enabling technology for the HDD and PC industries. Also, as the price of actuators drops and precision improves, there is a possibility that piezoelectric devices will replace voice-coil mechanisms in the HDD itself. The small piezoelectric displacement would need to be amplified. If this comes about, it would be a significant commercial application, with anticipated volumes of a billion or more devices per year in the early part of the next decade.

AVX Corporation is based in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and is majority-owned by Kyocera, a leading Japanese ceramics company (Rawal, 1996). AVX's main line of business is the manufacture of multilayer ceramic capacitors used in a variety of electronics applications. The AVX Myrtle Beach plant employs 2,400 workers and produces over 100 million components per day.

Several years ago, spurred by a subcontract from Lockheed Martin related to space mirrors, AVX began developing and manufacturing piezoelectric ceramic stack actuators. Besides HDD applications, AVX is trying to develop other markets for the technology. Although AVX has captured a significant share of the HDD manufacturing equipment market and there is potential for higher-volume busi-

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

ness if stack actuators are introduced in the HDD itself, this line of business still is not large enough to be a consistent moneymaker.

Although majority-owned by a Japanese corporation, AVX operates according to U.S. investment and business criteria. It is very difficult for AVX or other U.S. based companies to stay in businesses with marginal near-term prospects, regardless of the size or profitability of future markets. By contrast, AVX's competitors, such as Japan's Murata and TDK, are able to operate on a longer time horizon.

The structure of the microelectronics business plays a part as well. In the United States, suppliers of materials, components, equipment, and final products are often different companies, doing business with a range of suppliers and customers. A manufacturer of components may be reluctant to give feedback to a materials supplier because of concern that the information could be passed along to a competitor. In Japan, electronics producers tend to be more vertically integrated, and relationships between suppliers and manufacturers often are conducted on a longer-term basis that de-emphasizes short-term price concerns and facilitates greater exchange of information than what often occurs in the United States.

It is these factors, such as relative ability to operate on longer business investment horizons, more collaborative supplier-manufacturer interaction, and others, that have allowed Japanese companies to capitalize on U.S.-invented technologies such as liquid crystal displays (LCDs). The same factors may put Japanese firms in a better position to capitalize on the emerging commercial applications of piezoelectric ceramics than are U.S.-based companies. One advantage that the United States still has in this area that was not true in the LCD case is that U.S.-based firms are still very strong in the HDD business.

An example from AVX's main business shows that, once research-based products are introduced in commercial applications, incremental process improvements can make a much greater contribution to product performance than basic scientific and engineering research. Over the past two decades or so, the capacitance per unit volume of multilayer ceramic capacitors has gone up by two orders of magnitude, whereas improved materials properties went up by only 18 percent. The main factor driving improved performance was the ability to make very thin layers with better reliability at lower cost.

Human resource and research funding issues

Workshop participants identified human resource and research funding issues as key determinants of U.S. ability to capitalize on its superior research base in piezoelectric ceramics in the future. Several participants mentioned that U.S. ability to capitalize on research in this field would be improved if students and academic researchers had a better understanding of the applications context for their work.

This issue is illustrated by participation in U.S.-Japan joint seminars on piezoelectric ceramics held over the past 15 years with U.S. government support from ONR and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (Freiman, 1996). Japanese participants tend to come from industry, whereas U.S. participants tend

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

to come from universities. Although U.S. academic researchers have benefited from insights into what is happening in Japan, the lack of U.S. industry participation in these sorts of exchanges means that U.S. graduate students and other academic researchers may lack important knowledge concerning the technological context for their research.

This is more fundamental than simply asking students to look at factors such as cost and manufacturability. Even before that, researchers need more intimate knowledge of why their research is directed toward solving a given problem or improving a given property. In an area such as piezoelectric ceramics, where there are competing technologies for many applications, students need to learn more about those alternatives and the various tradeoffs. Participants agreed that not only students, but the entire academic research enterprise could benefit from this sort of exposure.4

Government research funding was another issue discussed by participants, although there was no clear consensus on where the U.S. system is falling short and what needs to be changed. There was some agreement that the United States has been very successful in capitalizing on research leadership in the high performance and mission-critical areas. In civilian areas more likely to yield significant economic benefits, by contrast, several participants believe that the Japanese government has been more effective than the U.S. government in providing stable, long-term funding for research on basic enabling technologies.

Optical Sensing

For the purpose of this study, optical sensing is defined as the use of light to detect a substance or property other than photons. 5 Therefore, optical detectors, such as photodiodes, are excluded from the definition. Optical sensing systems can be generically described as consisting of a light source, a photodetector, some way of transmitting the light from the source to the detector, and a modulator region where the quantity being detected (pressure, temperature, or a chemical) interacts with the light and produces a change in the characteristics of the light. Any of the characteristics of light (amplitude, frequency, phase, polarization state) can be utilized in the sensor.

Optical sensing research is inherently interdisciplinary and driven by applications. Knowledge from electrochemistry, analytical chemistry, optical spectroscopy, and optoelectronics is drawn upon. Note that a generic description of optical communication systems is similar to that of optical sensing systems, with both

4.  

For example, Michael Cima first became interested in the HDD applications for piezoelectric ceramics, an issue outside his specialty, through discussions with a Master's student at MIT who was working for a supplier to a stack actuator manufacturer.

5.  

This section is based primarily on the presentations of Michael Butler and John Woodward at the COSEPUP Workshop on Piezoelectric Ceramics and Optical Sensing, Washington, D.C., May 23, 1996.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

requiring a light source, a detector, and a way of putting information on the light beam. Components being developed for optical communications are available for optical sensing. Because optical communications is a multibillion-dollar industry, companies are willing to devote significant resources to develop the necessary components, such as optical fibers, laser diodes, and photodetectors.

Optical sensing as an industry is small and fragmented, and so, capital is not readily available to develop dedicated component technologies. The ability to draw on communications-targeted advances is an important advantage. However, components developed for communications may not have the optimal characteristics for sensing applications. For example, several of the parameters of optimal light sources are different for communications and sensing.

The focus of the workshop discussion was on fiber-optic sensors. There are three basic types that use the fiber as a sensor (see Figure A-2) and a fourth that uses the fiber to route light from the sensing end or probe to the spectroscopic instrument. Intensity sensors are useful for detecting pressure or forces. An optical fiber is inserted in a double jawed chuck. As pressure is applied, the bend radius of the fiber gets smaller, and so less light is transmitted. A bimetallic strip also can be utilized. The strip intercepts part of the beam and, as the temperature changes, the strip bends, intercepting more or less light.

A second type of optical sensor is polarimetric. The fiber is rotated with magneto-optic or electro-optic materials to detect magnetic or electric fields.

A third type of sensor is interferometric, such as a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. One of the fibers is coated with a magneto-restrictive material to make a magnetic-field sensor. It can be coated with a substance that will react with the substance to be detected. Most chemical fiber-optic sensors use this mechanism.

A fourth type of sensor uses the fiber to route light from an optical probe end to a spectroscopic instrument. These types of sensors are used to measure trace species and antibodies in blood or the concentration of chemicals in a process flow.

Thus far, optical sensors have not been utilized widely because fiber optics and other components of the system are expensive. In areas where another sensor technology is well established, a new approach needs to carry a significant cost or performance advantage to gain a foothold. Therefore, applications of optical sensing have been limited so far to areas where the technology has unique advantages. Optical sensors are not affected by electromagnetic interference (EMI), do not require wires (a safety issue in biomedical applications), are easily multiplexed, can be utilized for remote applications (there is no loss of performance kilometers away), are lightweight (important for aerospace applications), and operate over large bandwidths. Although optical sensing is a small and fragmented business today, experts at the COSEPUP workshop expressed the view that, as costs come down, optical sensors will replace other technologies in a wide range of applications in the future.

Research and applications leadership

There are three major research communities in optical sensing: the United

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

States, Europe, and Japan. It is somewhat difficult to say who is ahead or behind in research because the field is so broad and fragmented. The United States is ahead in areas driven by particular applications, such as space and health care. Although one participant expressed the view that Europe might be ahead overall, an examination of the production of research papers shows that the United States produces a large share of the world's research in terms of volume. In addition to work at universities, work at U.S. national laboratories is also significant in this field. The experts agreed that work in Japan is more oriented toward applications than is work in Europe or the United States.

The United States leads in research in several areas driven by government interest in specific applications. There are several promising applications in the

Figure A-2.

Source: Michael Butler.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

defense area. One is use of optical sensors in conjunction with "fly by light" actuation for aircraft control surfaces. Actuation traditionally was accomplished through hydraulic systems and, more recently, "fly by wire" actuation through electronics has become utilized widely. The military driver for fly-by-light is the increased use of composite materials in aircraft, which provides less protection for control systems against EMI. Because fiber optics are not affected by EMI and are also lighter, fly-by-light has several key potential advantages over fly-by-wire. Optical sensors would be key components of any fly-by-light system.

Another military-derived application is in fiber-optic hydrophones. DoD has invested considerable sums to develop towed fiber-optic arrays for naval vessels, aimed at detecting submarines. Work is now under way to adapt these systems for commercial applications, such as oil exploration. DoD has had a considerable impact because it has been willing to provide funding all the way from very fundamental work to applications, reducing the commercialization risk because the end product is known.

No country or company has yet capitalized heavily on optical sensing research in terms of developing successful applications for large markets or to advance other societal needs. Work on research and applications is moving in interesting directions, highlighting strengths and potential weaknesses in U.S. approaches compared to those of other countries.

Capitalization

As noted in the preceding section, most existing applications of optical sensing take advantage of unique aspects of the technology. For example, fiber temperature sensors have gained some acceptance in the food processing industry, particularly where microwave ovens are used, because of the absence of wires. In the electric utility industry, there are many potential applications such as monitoring currents, monitoring transformers, and distributed temperature monitoring for hot spots. Here, the EMI immunity of optical sensors is an advantage.

Health care applications also have received attention. Puritan-Bennett invested considerable resources in developing a sensor to simultaneously monitor several characteristics of blood (CO2, O2, and pH) which was ultimately unsuccessful. Other U.S. companies have continued work in this area, and the price of these systems is falling to near the level at which they might gain widespread market acceptance. Ingold, a division of the Swiss chemical company Ciba, is very strong in the area of blood oxygen sensors, and may be better positioned to capitalize on any major innovation than U.S. companies.

Besides DoD-funded work, one of the important pathways for capitalizing on optical sensing research is by small companies, often working with university researchers. The workshop participants mentioned several times that the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program has been an important source of support for these efforts. Because optical sensing research is a fragmented field, there is no focus on research funding by a particular agency. The targeted initial markets are often small, making large companies uninterested in pursuing them.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

SBIR support helps small companies to develop their innovations, and also plays a role in validating their technology for venture investors.

One advantage that the United States has had in this area is the relative ease with which researchers can work with industry. Links can be very direct. For example, an industry R&D manager typically will go to a conference, see an interesting presentation, and then invite the researcher to give a talk at the manager's company. There are signs that this open environment may be changing and that, as universities become more concerned about protecting intellectual property rights, exchanges may require more formal preconditions. Opportunities to learn of new developments through serendipity may decline. This is a particularly important point for optical sensing because it requires lateral thinking and the ability to capture and integrate knowledge from a number of different fields.

Future directions

The workshop participants identified several research directions that could lead to important developments in the future. One area is the combination of optics and microfabrication, particularly silicon-related work on MEMS. The ultimate goal is the development of microinstruments. A group at Sandia National Laboratory has focused on microchemical sensors. Up until now the focus has been on discrete sensors in which a coating on the fiber optic would transduce the chemical to be detected into a signal. However, it is difficult to discriminate whether one chemical or a similar one is present if they both react similarly to the coating. Several approaches are being explored to overcome this difficulty, such as molecular recognition and highly specific binding sites, and development of a mass spectrometer on a chip.

Chemical sensors are a particular area of focus for optical sensing research, even outside the MEMS area. For example, periodic gratings are being developed to see the absorption characteristics of molecules. Chemical sensors for corrosive species or dangerous chemicals could eliminate use of reference cells.

Cost is a major issue in developing a product with wide acceptance. For example, several companies have developed a charge-couple device (CCD) spectrometer, but a computer is still required to run it. Interesting work is being done to use modified commercial camcorders, which utilize CCDs, to lower the cost of optical sensing systems.

Research funding and human resource issues

Participants mentioned a number of relevant policy issues, several of which have emerged in the examination of other cases.

First, concern was expressed that U.S. government basic research funding is becoming too conservative. Although no hard evidence was presented, several participants expressed the view that funding is increasingly directed toward areas where the answers are already known, and not enough is being spent on truly fundamental work. This may be part of an international trend in which research funding and performing organizations are increasingly scrutinized and asked to

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

measure and report concrete results. In optical sensing, a field that does not have a dedicated source of funding and where most work is applications oriented to begin with, maintaining the level of funding for fundamental work is seen as critical.

Interestingly enough, this stress on the importance of fundamental research was coupled with doubts about whether the United States really does benefit differentially from its research leadership in optical sensing. Because this is a field in which insights from various scientific fields need to be combined, there is an inherent tendency to look outside the organization to the wider research community. Researchers in optical sensing may expend more effort in tracking global developments.

A second point raised by participants was that tighter industry-university links in research and education would be helpful. One mechanism used in some European countries is government subsidization of a three-year university-industry postdoctoral research program. The student is hired by the company and alternates between the company and an academic lab. This helps the company to stay linked to fundamental research developments and allows the student to gain familiarity with industry problems. One participant noted that, in the context of optical sensing work in the United States, such a program would be particularly useful if it was targeted at smaller companies.

Catalysis

A catalyst is a substance that speeds up a chemical reaction without itself being consumed in the process. Over 90 percent of the currently practiced processes in the chemical and petroleum industries depend on one or more catalysts (Bell, 1997). These industries contribute over $700 billion to the Gross Domestic Product and employ over one million people.

The development of new catalysts and catalytic processes is a continuing focus for the chemical and petroleum industries for several reasons. Better catalysts can improve the efficiency of existing processes by allowing more of the desired product to be produced from a given amount of reactant materials, or by allowing the process to take place at lower temperature or pressure. New catalysts can enable the utilization of cheaper feedstocks, which also reduces cost. Novel catalytic techniques can make possible new processes and the synthesis of new chemicals or materials with unique, desirable properties. Finally, developments in catalysis can lead to improved processes in which the resulting waste products are less hazardous or even useful.

Many types of materials can serve as catalysts, including metals, compounds (metal oxides, sulfides, nitrides), organometallic complexes, and enzymes (Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology, 1992). There are several different types of catalytic processes. A homogeneous catalytic process is one in which the catalyst is in solution with at least one of the reactants. In a heterogeneous catalytic process, the catalyst is in a different phase (usually solid) from the reactants (generally gas or liquid). Heterogeneous processes often are preferred because the catalyst can be separated easily from the products and reused. The catalyst can be in a porous

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

form so that the reaction takes place in the pores, or in a monolithic state in which the reaction takes place on the surface. In a supported catalytic reaction, small particles of the active material are spread over a less active substance, whereas an unsupported reaction does not utilize a less active substance.

The first commercially utilized catalytic process was developed in Germany early in this century, and utilized iron to catalyze the synthesis of ammonia (NH3) from nitrogen and hydrogen (Board on Chemical Sciences and Technology, 1992, p. 3). Other important developments in catalysis over the years include Monsanto's process to selectively produce the active left-handed isomer of L-Dopa, a drug used to treat Parkinson's disease, and the emergence of catalytic converters that remove exhaust gases from automobile emissions.

At the February 1997 workshop on Capitalizing on U.S. Research in Catalysis, the discussion covered several subareas of catalysis, and raised more general issues important to the field and the overall capitalizing study.

Zeolites and molecular sieves

Zeolites are the most widely used type of molecular sieve, which are inorganic solids that can organize and react molecules with an angstrom-level specificity (Davis, 1997). In addition to being used in chemical reactions, zeolites are commonly used in detergents. Zeolites have pores of absolutely uniform sizes in the range of a small molecule, the current state of the art for pore size being 12 Å or below. Zeolites have been studied and utilized since the 1950s. Much of the early research and application focus was on crystals of silicon and aluminum oxide. In the 1980s, researchers began experimenting with other materials, and a number of new zeolites have emerged. The use of different materials produces different structures with different-size pores.

Zeolites are used in several ways. A zeolite with reactant shape selectivity is used if one of the reactants is to be allowed into the crystal and others kept out. A zeolite with product shape selectivity lets only certain-sized products out of the crystal. In a reaction with more than one transition state, a zeolite with transition-state selectivity will not allow one of the states to form. The zeolite's active site is produced by the framework element, such as aluminum or titanium.

Zeolite catalysis has been used widely in the petrochemical area but is just beginning to emerge in the production of higher value-added materials such as fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Workshop participants observed that, over the past 15 years or so, research leadership has moved from U.S. oil companies to U.S. universities, although a number of foreign universities and companies have excellent research efforts under way.

Because of the growing demand for environmentally benign processes, and the research advances of the past decade that have allowed the development of zeolites that can catalyze a broad spectrum of reactions, zeolites are well positioned for wider application. A few examples were discussed that illustrate this promise. One is the use of platinum-based Pt-zeolite for the L-aromatization of n-hexane to make benzene. This is a much more efficient way to make benzene than previous

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

processes. The process was first reported in 1980 and subsequently commercialized by Chevron.

Another example illustrates how zeolites can be used in more environmentally benign processes. Cumene is a material used to make resins. Cumene synthesis is accomplished in the liquid or gas phases, and can lead to corrosion, leaching, or disposal problems. There are now at least five commercial processes using zeolites to produce cumene that have emerged in the past few years, including a process introduced by Dow Chemical in 1992, which are running very well and are reducing the environmental problems.

It is inherently challenging to replace traditional stoichiometric processes with zeolite catalysis for making pharmaceuticals and fine chemicals, because of the complexity of the molecules that are being synthesized. Incentives to lower production costs and environmental impact traditionally have not been as pressing as is the case with large-volume petrochemical or commodity chemical products. Yet the cost-benefit equation is changing with the emergence of new zeolites. One example is Hoechst's new route to making the anti-inflammatory ibuprofen. The process takes only three steps, which are all catalytic. One workshop participant remarked that European pharmaceutical and chemical companies appear to be more aggressive than are U.S. companies in developing these new processes.

Trends in zeolite research and capitalization raise a number of important issues. Applications traditionally have been driven by industry, without a great deal of industry-university interaction in research. However, a number of the U.S. oil companies cut back their zeolite research in the 1980s, whereas research in U.S. universities has become much stronger. Now that U.S. university work is increasingly ripe for capitalization, it appears that European and Japanese companies are more interested in working with U.S. universities than are U.S. companies.

Workshop participants discussed several possible reasons for this trend. Research and development at U.S. chemical and petrochemical companies has become focused increasingly on shorter-term problems and outcomes, making companies less interested in working on fundamental problems with universities. This short-term orientation also means that intellectual property rights issues can arise as a barrier to U.S. industry-academic collaboration.

Single-site olefin polymerization catalysts

Leaving aside hydrocarbons, polymerization is the largest application of catalysis (Goodall, 1997). In contrast to zeolites, where developments have been driven by industry, every milestone in the past 40 years in polymerization was made in academia. In 1953, German chemist Karl Ziegler discovered a new technique for catalyzing the synthesis of polyethylene. European academics, including Ziegler and Italy's Julian Natta, led the way in making discoveries of better catalysts, such as TiCl4 and TiCl3, to make polyethylene, polypropylene, and other polymers of a specific tacticity from monomers such as ethylene and propylene. Interestingly, many of the most important discoveries were made accidentally, and we still do not have a complete understanding of how Ziegler-Natta catalysts work.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Ziegler-Natta polymerization has some limitations. For example, it does not work with some monomers, or when a functional group is incorporated into the monomer (as in the synthesis of polyvinyl chloride).

Recently, a new type of polymerization, also using metal complexes as initiators, has been developed, called metallocene catalysis polymerization. Metallocenes are homogenous catalysts and are not new themselves. The name goes back to 1954, with the development of ferrocene, which consisted of two C5 rings around an iron atom in a sandwich structure. Metallocenes were used as components of Ziegler-Natta catalysts from the 1950s, with a number of research developments emerging from academic labs during the 1960s and 1970s. Germany had several of the world's best research groups during this period.

Since the late 1980s, the applications of metallocene catalysts have expanded greatly, and research promises that this growth will continue. Metallocenes are single-site catalysts because each molecule contains a single metal atom at the core as an active site. This encourages molecules to connect with each other in a highly predictable way. Single-site catalysis allows the development of new forms of polymer materials with very specific features. Research advances are beginning to allow the rational design of catalysts and materials. Metallocenes allow unprecedented control over the microstructure and molecular weight of the product material.

The limitations of the technology include the inability to polymerize monomers bearing functional groups, with very few exceptions. Metallocenes are very expensive, and it likely will be years before they are used to produce commodity materials.

The leading research in academia is now done in the United States, with outstanding groups at California Institute of Technology, Stanford, University of Iowa, and several other places. Companies from around the world are competing to apply metallocene catalysts, including Exxon and Dow Chemical in the United States, Fina in Italy, British Petroleum, Hoechst in Germany, and Mitsui Petrochemical in Japan.

Another recent development is the emergence of catalytic materials that are cousins of metallocenes but are based on transition metals such as nickel and palladium. DuPont, the University of North Carolina, W.R. Grace, BFGoodrich, BP Chemicals, California Institute of Technology, and Shell Chemicals are doing leading-edge work in this area. These new transition-metal catalysts overcome some of the disadvantages of metallocenes, most notably the inability of metallocenes to incorporate functional groups.

One of the U.S. Department of Commerce's Advanced Technology Program (ATP) focused programs in recent years was in the area of catalysis, including transition-metal single-site catalysts.

Other metal and metal oxide catalysts

In metal and metal oxide catalysis, 80 percent of the reactions are heterogeneous, many were discovered by accident, and many are not well understood

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

(Warren, 1996). At the active site the metal or metal oxide breaks bonds and provides oxygen. The support material, which also may be a metal oxide, disperses, coordinates, and stabilizes the active metal. A promoter material tunes the metal oxidation state, blocks unselective reactions, and creates active sites.

Important reactions using metal and metal oxide catalysts include selective partial oxidations. For example, in a reaction known as epoxidation, a silver metal catalyst supported by alpha-alumina with promoters is used to produce ethylene oxide from ethylene. Much of the current effort in metal and metal oxide catalysis is aimed at replacing light olefins, such as ethylene and propylene, with cheaper feedstocks such as alkanes. Another area of effort is complete oxidation (combustion) reactions.

A group of 12 academic and industrial catalysis researchers was polled informally for their views on U.S. performance in research and capitalization. The group consisted of seven academic and five industry researchers; five chemical engineers, and seven chemists. The sense of the respondents is that the United States enjoys research leadership today and is effective, particularly in the characterization of new catalysts.

However, several respondents see the United States as being in a state of decline relative to Europe. The short-term orientation of U.S. industry and the barriers to enhanced university-industry collaboration were mentioned. Both industrial and academic laboratories appear to prefer collaborations overseas. On the other hand, respondents see U.S. academic research and education as very strong. Several respondents from industry believe it would be helpful if students could gain more experience and insight into industry problems.

Biocatalysis

The term biocatalysis refers to the utilization of enzymes as catalysts (isolated and whole cells) (Drueckhammer, 1997). Enzymes are proteins that act as organic catalysts, and are essential to many of the chemical reactions needed to sustain life. Several of the research breakthroughs needed to utilize enzymes as catalysts were made in the late 1970s. The pioneers in this work are still active but most have moved on to work in other areas.

One problem blocking use of enzymes as catalysts is that they are unstable compared to molecules. This disadvantage has been overcome to some extent. Enzymes are also very specific in terms of the support material required and the reactions that a given enzyme will catalyze, but this can be an advantage in some places. Enzymes are expensive, but in the long-term can bring down costs of processes. Still, they generally are viewed as being limited to small-scale, high-value applications. Enzymes work best in water, rather than in organic media.

One example of enzyme utilization is as proteases in detergents. Other applications are in the food industry. For example, in making high-fructose corn syrup, enzymes are used to convert starch to glucose and glucose to fructose. Enzymes also are used to produce amino acids. Most of these applications were developed by industry before academia was interested.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Future applications include the isolation of the effective isomer in a racemic compound, similar to the applications of zeolites discussed earlier. Enzymes also may be used in "metabolic engineering," such as the production of analog streptomycenes by "engineered" microorganisms.

Compared with several other areas of catalysis examined at the workshop, biocatalysis is one area in which small start-ups are relatively important. Some small companies make enzymes, such as Altus (a subsidiary of Vertex), Thermogen (has isolated enzymes from materials that grow at high temperatures in order to overcome stability problems), and Amano (a supplier of enzymes to the food industry). Large pharmaceutical companies are also active in some areas of research, as are biotech companies such as Celgene and Sepracor.

There is much less work in academic research now than during the 1980s, because of a sense that the most important academic problems have been solved. The most important tasks for industry are to make enzymes more stable or to develop enzymes that work in organic media. These are essentially engineering problems that companies attack using people who possess traditional synthetic chemistry backgrounds. There is not a large demand for people with advanced degrees who specialized in biocatalysis.

Issues and lessons

Unlike several other fields examined for this study, catalysis research has not been heavily supported by the federal government, either DoD or other mission agencies. The United States has not enjoyed clear research leadership across the board, but U.S. companies generally have been well positioned to capitalize on research, and U.S. universities have maintained a critical mass of talent and activity.

In recent years, academic interest in some areas of catalysis has been declining relative to surface science, particularly in chemistry departments. Still, U.S. universities, particularly chemical engineering departments, have emerged at the forefront of research. U.S. industry, particularly the oil companies, have cut long-term catalysis research. Foreign companies have long been effective at capitalizing, and remain so. Because many of the important tasks in catalysis are incremental and long-term, the field is not attractive to start-up companies and venture capital.

Particularly in the most rapidly emerging subfields of catalysis, there is clearly a growing commonality of scientific interest between U.S. industry and U.S. universities. As in most of the fields examined for the study, the university-industry interface will likely emerge as the most important element in U.S. capability to maintain research leadership and capitalize on that leadership. However, the workshop discussion uncovered a number of barriers to closer cooperation within the United States in areas such as treatment of intellectual property and the expected time horizons for results. Although some U.S. companies and universities are forging closer ties, workshop participants observed that, in some areas, U.S. industry and academia often find it easier to work with foreign partners.

The idea that the federal government can play a positive role in fostering closer and more effective university-industry ties resonated among participants,

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

but there were differences in perspective over how to accomplish this. Some participants were positive about initiatives such as the ATP Focused Program on Catalysis and Biocatalysis. Others favored initiatives that would more directly involve universities. For example, catalysis is not the focus of any special continuing federal research effort such as the Engineering Research Centers or Science and Technology Centers of NSF

Finally, a number of participants observed that education and human resource issues are critical, as was true for just about all of the other cases. The general sense of the workshop discussion was that the United States does a good job of training students relative to that of other countries. Although demand for chemists and chemical engineers focused on some areas of catalysis has been slack, their skills and knowledge are often transferable to other areas, such as surface science, where the electronics industry has a growing demand for talent. There were differences of perspective over whether the lack of jobs in catalysis research should be seen as a negative, or whether the flexibility of students should be seen as a positive.

Examples of Japanese Capitalization on External Research

This section describes several cases in which Japan has capitalized on research performed elsewhere: the basic oxygen steel process, numerically controlled (NC) machine tools, and LCDs.

Basic oxygen steel process

Developed in Austria in the early 1950s, the basic oxygen process uses pure oxygen rather than air to convert molten iron into steel. 6 It allows higher productivity and the utilization of a wider range of raw materials than earlier processes.

During the 1950s, Japanese engineers did not have as many resources to stay abreast of global technological developments through travel and technical journals as did Western engineers. Japan's trading companies played a significant role by gathering information about the oxygen steel process and disseminating it to steel companies. By 1955, Nippon Kokan and Yawata Steel had learned enough about the process to became interested in licensing it, and approached the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) for foreign exchange approval to conclude licensing agreements.

MITI brokered an agreement whereby Nippon Kokan would be the principal licensee, but would sublicense the technology to other Japanese steelmakers. This was a common MITI practice, which lowered the overall price to Japanese industry of critical foreign technologies. MITI and the steel industry also set up the Basic Oxygen Committee in 1956 to act as a clearinghouse for information exchange about the new process. The committee held regular meetings and facilitated informal contacts among engineers.

6.  

This account is based on the account by Tessa Morris-Suzuki (1994, pp. 189-191), who, in turn, bases much of her account on that of Lynn (1982).

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

At the same time, individual companies were competing to refine and adapt the process. Japanese steel companies worked with firms in related industries to develop complementary innovations. For example, the new process caused the refractory bricks lining the new converters to wear out very quickly. Yawata Steel and Kurosaki, a refractory brick maker, developed an improved brick.

More rapid adoption of the basic oxygen process than that by U.S. and European steel companies was a factor contributing to the success of the Japanese steel industry over the next several decades. In 1960 the Japanese steel industry was only half as productive as the European industry and one-third as productive as the U.S. industry. By the early 1980s, Japanese productivity in steel had overtaken that of the United States and Europe.

The Japanese steel industry had several advantages, such as rapid growth in demand for steel, which gave Japanese firms more opportunity to build new plants with modern technology. Still, this case illustrates the effectiveness of Japanese institutions such as trading companies, industry associations, collaborative research, and government coordination, in scouting, importing, diffusing, and improving foreign technologies during the postwar period.

NC machine tools

Numerical control, which allowed machine tools to be automated, was developed in the early 1950s by a subcontractor to the U.S. Air Force in cooperation with researchers at MIT.7 An MIT report on NC machinery was brought to Japan by a Japanese professor working at the University of California, and publicized by an industry research association.

Several companies and universities in Japan started working on NC technology. Fujitsu, a telecommunications equipment company, set up a team to work on the technology, and produced a prototype NC turret punch press in 1956. Fujitsu began to work with other machinery companies to develop the technology further. Japan's first commercial NC tool was developed by Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for use in the latter's Nagoya aircraft factory. Fujitsu set up its Fanuc subsidiary to focus on NC technology in the late 1950s.

During the 1960s, Fanuc played a key role in incorporating advanced electronics, first transistors and then integrated circuits, into NC controls. Fanuc and other Japanese companies also continued to stay abreast of research developments in the United States and actively licensed technologies. Because of cost reductions enabled by use of microelectronics and other factors such as rapidly rising labor costs and growth in Japan's machine-tool demand, a significant market for relatively inexpensive general-purpose NC tools developed among Japan's small manufacturers during the 1960s and 1970s. MITI and regional governments set up programs to promote technical information exchange and provide assistance to small manufacturers, which also fed this growth.

7.  

This account is based on Morris-Suzuki (1994, pp. 199-202), who in turn cites Friedman (1988), as well as Japanese language sources.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

In contrast to developments in Japan, U.S. machine tool makers focused their NC product offerings on highly sophisticated customers, a profitable but relatively small market. By the time smaller U.S. manufacturers began to demand NC tools, Japanese companies were better positioned to supply them. The Fanuc NC controller became the industry standard. By 1983, Japan led the world in machine tool production.

Lcds

Liquid crystal materials were discovered in 1888 by F. Renitzer, an Austrian botanist.8 In 1963, George Heilmeier and other researchers at RCA discovered that electrical charges affect how light passes through liquid crystal materials, and they began work to develop an electronic display that would utilize liquid crystals. By 1966, they had demonstrated the first prototype liquid crystal alphanumeric displays in instruments and cockpit applications as well as digital voltmeters and digital clocks. These prototypes were shown to the world in 1968. The ultimate goal was to develop a liquid-crystal flat-panel television that could be hung on a wall. Although RCA was able to demonstrate the technology, it lacked a liquid crystal material that would remain stable at room temperature in the nematic phase in which the display could function. George Gray, a professor at Hull University in England, made the key discovery of cyanobiphenyl materials that exhibited room-temperature nematic phases. Several European firms developed and patented these materials, and continue to hold a strong position in supplying liquid crystal materials today.

At the same time that RCA was developing its flat television prototype, the electronic calculator industry was growing rapidly, enabled by developments in microelectronics. American and Japanese companies were at the forefront of this industry, and extensive business and technological ties developed. For example, Intel developed the first microprocessor for use in a calculator made by Busicom, a Japanese firm that has since gone out of business. Rockwell International sold key calculator components to Japan's Sharp, which assembled them.

In the early 1970s, leading calculator companies were searching for an appropriate display technology to use in hand-held units. The display would need to be visible in ambient light and not consume an excessive amount of power. Rockwell and Texas Instruments both did work on LCDs. Combining insights from its own work, exposure to Rockwell's work, and technology licensed from RCA, Sharp produced the EL-8025, which it claims is the world's first electronic calculator using an LCD. Rockwell also produced a calculator with an LCD at around the same time, but soon exited the calculator business because it was a low-margin activity outside the company's core military and space work.

8.  

This account is based mainly on a telephone interview with Lawrence Tannas on November 25, 1997. It is supplemented by material from Tannas et al. (1992) and material from the Sharp Corporation World Wide Web page.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Although light-emitting diodes emerged as the display technology of choice for hand-held calculators during the 1970s, LCDs emerged again in the late 1980s with major advantages as a display technology in the rapidly growing electronic watch business. A number of U.S. and Japanese companies entered the LCD business during the latter half of the 1970s. However, the technology was widely available and straightforward, and so, U.S. companies tended to move manufacturing to offshore locations when it became cost-effective to do so. Japanese companies, including Suwa-Seiko (now Seiko Epson), Sanyo, Canon, and others, were more inclined to see such component technologies as fundamental capabilities for a range of consumer-oriented electronics businesses and long-term growth.

As was the case with NC tools, Japanese companies continued to supplement their own incremental improvements of LCD technology with insights gained from foreign research. In 1983, Sanyo and Suwa-Seiko demonstrated the first twisted nematic active matrix LCD (TN-AMLCD). The use of a poly-silicon semiconductor substrate was a key improvement pioneered by Sanyo and Suwa-Seiko. However, amorphous silicon soon dominated the industry. The target market at that time was hand-held televisions, first black and white and then color.

The super-twisted nematic LCD (STN-LCD) was first reported by European researchers Terry Scheffer and Juergen Nehring in the early 1980s (Scheffer and Nehring, 1990). STN-LCD became the dominant technology for manufacturing portable computer displays, an application that emerged in the second half of the 1980s and is now a multibillion-dollar business. The TN-AMLCD using amorphous silicon became the major display technology in the 1990s for notebook computers and hand-held televisions. Technologies other than LCDs were tried in portable computers, but all have been replaced with LCDs as STN-LCDs and TN-AMLCDs have continued to improve their performance as costs have declined gradually. Japanese firms have dominated this business, although Korean, and to a lesser extent Taiwanese, companies have entered in recent years and appear to be enjoying significant success.

In the LCD case, as in basic oxygen steel and NC machinery, Japanese companies displayed adeptness in incorporating new component technologies in a variety of products, enabling the emergence of larger mass markets. Long-term efforts on complementary technologies enabled Japanese industry to capitalize on foreign research. The role of Japanese government and industry research laboratories in gathering information and diffusing technology to individual companies is apparent in the LCD case.

Fuzzy Logic

Fuzzy logic is a field of research and application in which fundamental discoveries made in the United States were first reduced to practice and capitalized on overseas. Fuzzy logic is a system for representing and manipulating values associated with vague or uncertain concepts, such as "large," warm," and "fast," which can be seen simultaneously to belong partially to two or more different, contradictory sets of values (JTEC, 1993). In contrast to traditional logic, which represents

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

objects in terms of sharp distinctions, fuzzy logic allows an object to be represented as a member of a class in a graded way.

Fuzzy logic was invented by Lotfi Zadeh, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, in the 1960s. Researchers in the United States and abroad began developing applications for fuzzy logic. In 1973, at Queen Mary College/ London University, Ebrahim Mamdani and Sedrak Assilian applied fuzzy logic to the control system of a small steam engine. Lauritz Peter Holmblad and and Jens Jorgen Østergaard, corporate engineers at F. L. Smidth (now FLS Automation), learned of this work and began research on an automatic cement kiln control system utilizing fuzzy logic in the mid 1970s (McNeill and Freiberger, 1993). In 1980 the first high-level kiln control system became commercially available, supplied by FLS.9 Today, most cement kilns use fuzzy logic control (L. Zadeh, University of California at Berkeley, personal communication, June 30, 1998).

Fuzzy logic caught on quickly in Japan, perhaps because of a cultural tolerance for uncertainty. In 1968, papers on fuzzy logic began to appear in Japanese journals. In 1972, Professor Toshiro Terano of Hosei University introduced fuzzy logic to the research community in Japan and several study groups were formed. This led to research and applications mainly in the area of physical systems control.

In 1987, after eight years of development, the fuzzy-controlled Sendai Subway system went into operation (McNeill and Freiberger, 1993, p. 155). The system was developed by Hitachi. Besides featuring an extremely smooth ride, the subway stops and starts more accurately than a human-operated train, and cuts energy usage by 10 percent. By 1990, fuzzy logic had been implemented in a wide range of home electric appliances in Japan (Munakata and Jani, 1994).

In contrast to researchers in Europe and Japan, who were receptive to applying fuzzy logic, progress has been slower in the United States (JTEC, 1993). Important segments of the U.S. research community have been indifferent or hostile to fuzzy logic. Although mathematical work on fuzzy logic continued in the United States, the interested community was isolated. More practical, engineering-oriented work was slow to develop.

Zadeh himself, who has remained an active and effective advocate for his ideas, believes that discomfort with the word "fuzzy," the American tradition of respect for precision, and an entrenched establishment of control system techniques all prevented the U.S. research community from embracing the theory (L. Zadeh, University of California at Berkeley, personal communication, June 30, 1998). Engineers in industry working on controls for various products have been skeptical that fuzzy logic could deliver better performance than effective implementation of traditional "crisp" logic. By contrast, there was less entrenchment in Japan and an eagerness for new ideas, which facilitated commercialization.

Currently, fuzzy logic is applied in a broad range of commercial products, such as automobile climate control and transmissions, microwaves and dishwashers, and other control systems. U.S. industry has become more receptive to utilizing the

9.  

FLS web site, http://www.flsautomation.dk

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

technology in recent years. U.S. firms, such as Otis Elevator and Motorola, that are active in the Japanese market and eager to respond to their Japanese customers' interest in fuzzy logic, are most advanced. The United States is still among the leading centers of research, with excellent work being done at institutions such as Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of New Mexico.

Capitalizing in the Social Sciences

Although this report focuses on capitalization in the natural sciences and engineering, research capitalization also occurs in the social sciences. Two examples from the field of economics illustrate the successful application of social science theory to real-world problems. 10 Research in the area of options pricing has been applied to risk management and has helped to make a new exchange system successful. Game theory has been applied to spectrum license distribution, with the result of increased profits for the government and more efficient distribution of licenses.

Options pricing

In 1997, Robert C. Merton and Myron Scholes won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their work on the pricing of options. Myron Scholes and Fischer Black created a formula, first published in the Journal of Political Economy in 1973, relating options pricing to asset price volatility and time. Simultaneously, Robert Merton had applied these results to other types of financial assets. The Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE) opened for business that same month.11 This theory provided an efficient way to manage risk in stock portfolios, which has increased participation and improved liquidity. The presence of the theory makes the market more predictable and therefore more easily and more widely used, enhancing the value of exchanges. "Corporate strategists use the theory to evaluate business decisions; bond analysts use it to value risky debt; regulators use it to value deposit insurance; wildcatters use it to value exploration leases. In fact, the model can be used to examine any 'contract' whose worth depends on the uncertain future value of an asset" (The Economist, 1998).

The first application and growth in this area took place in the United States.

10.  

In the social sciences, as in the natural sciences, a research advance that is successfully capitalized is not necessarily a success in every single use of what was learned from the research. Some attempted applications of fundamental knowledge founder even when there have been many successful uses. Two such examples have arisen with the applications discussed here. Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), a hedge fund whose partners included the economists awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize for their work on options pricing, experienced huge losses and almost collapsed before the Federal Reserve Board worked with LTCM's creditors to work out a rescue plan. See The Economist (1998). Also, the Federal Communications Commission's successful auction program suffered a setback when procedures aimed at encouraging bidding by industry newcomers in a May 1996 auction backfired. A number of the winning bidders were subsequently unable to pay for the licenses. See Mills (1998).

11.  

www.cboe.com/cboe25th/news.html

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

The basic research was done in Boston during the 1970s. The CBOE opened in 1973 and, by 1997, four U.S. options exchanges were trading more than 350 million options contracts on 2,400 individual stocks. There are over 50 options exchanges in the world where options pricing based on the Black-Scholes equation is widely used.

Spectrum auctions

From July 1994 to May 1996, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) conducted six auctions for the distribution of radio spectrum licenses for wireless technologies. The system devised for these auctions was based on economic theory. The FCC enlisted John McMillan, an expert in game theory and economist at the University of California at San Diego, to apply the principles of game theory to help optimize the sale of licenses.

Game theory was created by mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern during the 1940s. Research on game theory was funded during the 1950s and 1960s by DoD, and it has become increasingly important in political science.12 Game theory is suited to highly structured situations, such as auctions. Auction theory is an application of game theory that was first developed for single-item auctions. William Vickrey received a Nobel Memorial Prize for critical analysis in this area. Recent advances in auction theory are for simultaneous multiple-item auctions and the use of experimental economics to design an auction in a way that helps people to reach the predicted equilibrium. Auction theory can be used to help people decide how to bid in an auction and also to design an auction so that the equilibrium will be as efficient as possible.

Several other academics helped to design the FCC spectrum auction system. The potential bidders hired consultants who filed briefs to the FCC and then, after the system was devised, advised their clients on the best methods to use during the auctions. Stanford University professors Jeremy Bulow, Paul R. Milgrom, and Robert B. Wilson, Yale University professor Barry J. Nalebuff, and University of Maryland economist Peter Cramton consulted for major telecommunications firms (O'Toole, 1994).

After considering all the input gathered on the auction process, the FCC decided on an electronic simultaneous multiple-round auction system. This system was chosen because many items' values were interdependent and an asynchronous auction might undervalue particular licenses. "This auction form proved remarkably successful. Similar items sold for similar prices, and bidders successfully formed efficient aggregations of licenses" (Cramton, 1997). The FCC has demonstrated its auction system to representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Hungary, Peru, Russia, South Africa, and Vietnam. Mexico has licensed this system and has used it in a spectrum auction.

12.  

A Nobel Memorial Prize was given to John Nash, John Harsanyi, and Reinhard Selten for work in game theory.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

Applying Research on Cognition and Learning in Education

A number of experts consulted by the panel believe that there is great potential for expanding capitalization on recent research on cognition and learning, which has developed important insights into the functioning of the human mind. This work is ongoing in a number of disciplines, including developmental psychology, linguistics, mathematical logic, philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience, as well as the relatively new interdisciplinary field of cognitive science.

Education is seen as a particularly promising area of application, given the content of the research and the pressing educational problems facing the United States, particularly in early care and learning during the preschool and early elementary school years. Yet research on cognition and learning is not making a measurable contribution to early care and education in the United States today, and even strong proponents of the research believe that prospects for the immediate future are mixed at best. This example illustrates the special challenges of capitalizing on research to address certain pressing national needs.

Research on cognition and learning

The recent wave of research on cognition and learning has its roots in the mid 1950s when a "cognitive revolution" began in American psychology and an interdisciplinary field of cognitive science began to develop.13 The hallmark of this wave of research is the effort to build understanding of human cognition and behavior from models of unobservable mental constructs related to information processing. 14 Research in these fields is being capitalized upon in a number of areas. Work by Herbert Simon and others underlies developments in artificial intelligence, for example.

Another example that is interesting because it is a clear case of capitalization success is conjoint measurement (also known as conjoint analysis), a technique based on insights from mathematical psychology and psychometrics. R. Duncan Luce, now a professor at the University of California at Irvine, and others developed conjoint measurement during the 1960s.15 The technique allows for the quantitative characterization of how two or more independent variables affect a psychological dependent variable. This class of problems is recurrent in psychological research. Several years after Luce's work, Paul E. Green of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and others showed how conjoint measurement could be applied to analyzing consumer preferences as an aid to developing and

13.  

For an overview of research on cognition and learning, see Bransford et al. (1998). For information on cognitive science as a discipline, see Stillings (1993) (http://hamp.hampshire.edu/-nasCCS/ nsfreport.html). Widespread use of the term "cognitive science" and the appearance of distinct educational and research programs has occurred only over the past 20 years.

14.  

John Bruer, "President's Statement," John S. McDonnell Foundation homepage (www.jsmf.org).

15.  

The seminal paper is Luce and Tukey (1964, p. 1).

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

marketing new products (Green and Wind, 1975). Over the past several decades, the technique has come to be widely used by corporate marketing departments and consulting companies. Research on cognition and learning also has generated a number of insights that have important implications for education and training.16

Research efforts also are being focused on the cognitive development and learning processes of young children. For example, research shows that "naive understanding," the often mistaken prior beliefs and concepts of children, plays an important role in learning.17 If new or contradictory information is introduced without addressing these prior beliefs and concepts, a child may construct a logical loophole to accommodate the contradiction rather than learn the correct concept.

The implications of this and other research insights for education are far reaching. Experts consulted by the panel believe that new approaches informed by research could significantly improve science and mathematics education in the early grades. In general, approaches informed by research on cognition and learning focus on developing a deep understanding of basic concepts that corrects the naive understanding of children by guiding them through a carefully structured process of discovery. This often implies much less emphasis on memorization of facts and information than traditional educational methods.

Efforts to capitalize

The panel was able to uncover several examples of efforts to apply research on cognition and learning in the classroom during the course of exploring this issue.18 Research on how children learn mathematics concepts has informed efforts to develop tools for "cognitively guided instruction," focusing on early elementary mathematics.19 Efforts also are being made to incorporate this improved understanding into training programs for teachers at professional schools of education and associated centers for educational research, often with support from the U.S. Department of Education or NSF. Private foundations play a key role in this area as well. The John S. McDonnell Foundation supports work aimed at applying cognitive science insights to education, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation played a catalyzing role in the original development of education and research programs in cognitive science.

A capitalization effort in the area of early science learning is under way at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science (IRCS) at the University of Pennsylvania.20 IRCS is one of NSF's Science and Technology Centers [see COSEPUP (1996a)]. A group of professional curriculum developers, classroom teachers, cog-

16.  

For a review of major insights and potential applications, see NRC/CBSSE (1994).

17.  

Bransford et al. (1998).

18.  

One prominent example is the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh (www.lrdc.pitt.edu). The examples here are illustrative, and not meant to present a comprehensive picture of developments in this field.

19.  

Telephone interview with Thomas Cooney, September 4, 1998

20.  

Telephone interview with Christine Massey, September 4, 1998.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

nitive developmental and educational researchers, and university scientists is developing, field testing, and evaluating science curricula to meet the developmental and practical needs of children in early elementary classrooms (kindergarten through second grade).

The unit on perception, Science Makes Sense, illustrates the overall approach of this initiative (Massey and Roth, 1997). Rather than utilize the traditional kindergarten approach linking the "five senses" with associated body parts, the IRCS-developed curriculum focuses on how we experience and get information about the world through different modalities. Children are guided through a sequence of carefully structured exercises that isolate various sensory modalities and help them become aware that immediate sensory experience can be incomplete or misleading. This approach addresses the naive understanding of five- and six-year olds, such as the common belief that the color of an object can be determined by touch. Science Makes Sense and other components of the IRCS curriculum are being field tested in Philadelphia elementary schools, with encouraging preliminary results.

Issues and barriers to capitalization

The poor relative performance of U.S. students in international comparative studies of mathematics and science education is well known.21 Improving education has been a major issue on the U.S. national agenda since the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk.22 Despite the promise of basic and applied research in cognition and learning to improve educational outcomes, there are several significant barriers that need to be addressed in order to realize this promise. This discussion is meant to be suggestive and illustrative rather than comprehensive and conclusive. A full assessment of these barriers would require a separate study. 23

1. Learning how to apply scientific insights requires focused effort.

The general insights and principles developed from the sciences of cognition and learning do not apply in exactly the same way in all fields of instruction. Thus, to move from controlled laboratory applications to particular educational settings is a major step that often requires focused research. Even where research provides clear and unambiguous direction for applications work, developing and testing concrete approaches for the classroom can be an arduous process. Effects on sustained learning of different approaches may take years to measure.

21.  

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which was recently completed, involved collection of data on half a million students from 41 countries, and is the largest, most comprehensive, and most rigorous international study of schools and students ever. The National Center for Education Statistics website is a useful starting point for finding out about TIMSS (http:/ /nces.ed.gov/TIMSS/). The TIMSS results contain no information bearing on the utility of learning research in K-12 education.

22.  

Respondents to a opinion poll named education as the issue most likely to influence their voting in the 1998 elections (Balz and Deane, 1998).

23.  

An extended discussion of the barriers to knowledge utilization is found in Bransford et al. (1998).

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×

2. Up to now, funding for the necessary focused efforts has been limited.

Research on cognition and learning is funded by agencies such as NSF, NIH, and the Department of Education. The latter agency also funds research on new educational techniques. Although some programs have funded work to apply research insights in educational settings, the amount of dedicated long-term funding is limited. For example, the IRCS effort described earlier benefits from access to funding through NSF's Science and Technology Centers (STC) program. STC funding has a limited duration, however, and it is not obvious how continued work will be supported after STC support ends.

3. Institutional incentives to transform useful research into classroom practice are lacking.

Additional funding may not be enough to change educational decision-making routines. Experience from educational reform initiatives suggests that the most promising efforts involve bridge building between education researchers, scientists, education schools, teachers, and communities. This is inherently difficult because these groups have different incentive and reward structures, and none is tasked with application of research in the classroom as a primary mission. For example, researchers advance their careers through successful publication of their research, which leads to tenure and status in their fields. They are not rewarded for making efforts to apply their research insights in the classroom. Teachers face numerous challenges in the classroom, and may have little time or incentive to learn about new approaches based on research. A lack of clear market signals in education may contribute to this institutional inertia.

4. Other possible barriers could be encountered in disseminating new approaches.

Some of the difficulties encountered in applying research on cognition and learning to the classroom are similar to those encountered in other interdisciplinary fields examined by the panel, such as bioinformatics. These barriers include the lack of dedicated funding sources and institutional structures. The application field of education itself could be the source of additional problems in the future. Even if the barriers discussed above can be overcome and new research-based approaches to early education are developed and tested, additional obstacles may be encountered in promoting the widespread adoption of new methods. Several of the experts interviewed by the panel pointed to the advantages that other countries might have over the United States in areas such as stronger systems for funding early care and education, and a stronger national government role in the education system. It is not clear that other countries are applying research on cognition and learning to the classroom more successfully than the United States, however.

Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 59
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 60
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 61
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 62
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 63
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 64
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 65
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 66
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 67
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 68
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 69
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 70
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 71
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 72
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 73
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 74
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 75
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 76
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 77
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 78
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 79
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 80
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 81
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 82
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 83
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 84
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 85
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 86
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 87
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 88
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 89
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 90
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 91
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 92
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 93
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 94
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 95
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 96
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 97
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 98
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 99
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 100
Suggested Citation:"Appendix A: Examples of Capitalization in Fields of Research and Application." National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine. 1999. Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/6442.
×
Page 101
Next: Appendix B: Committee Member Biographical Sketches »
Capitalizing on Investments in Science and Technology Get This Book
×
Buy Paperback | $52.00 Buy Ebook | $41.99
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF

Although the United States is currently capitalizing on its investment in science and technology effectively, there remains much room for improvement. This volume identifies the ingredients for success in capitalizing on such investments to produce national benefits, assesses current U.S. performance, and identifies future challenges. The book cites specific examples and examines several cross-cutting issues. It explores the possibility that the national research portfolio is losing diversity as a result of less long-term research in critical fields such as networking and materials. It also examines the implications of imbalances in the supply of and demand for science and engineering talent in emerging interdisciplinary fields such as bioinformatics.

  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    Switch between the Original Pages, where you can read the report as it appeared in print, and Text Pages for the web version, where you can highlight and search the text.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  9. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!