Directions in Engineering Research An Assessment of Opportunities and Needs (1987) / Chapter Skim
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1. Directions in Engineering Research: An Assessment of Opportunities and Needs
1. Directions in Engineering Research: An Assessment of Opportunities and Needs
Pages 1-76
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From page 1... ...
This report is an attempt to close the gap in understanding the nature of engineering research and to draw attention to the need for increased support in several key fields. THE NATURE OF ENGINEERING RESEARCH Engineering can no longer be described only in the context of its traditional disciplines: civil, mechanical, chemical, electrical, and so forth.
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For example, the evolution of the modern computer from electron tubes to transistors and then to integrated circuits is the result of engineering research that converted newly understood physical principles into practical working systems. Taken together, engineering and science research are crucial in a world in which competition through technology has assumed a commanding role in the interactions among nations.
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complex system software; advanced engineered materials; manufacturing systems integration; bioreactors; construction robotics; vehicle/guideway system integration; alternative fuel sources; low-grade mineral recovery; biomedical engineering; hazardous material control; the mechanics of slowly deteriorating systems; computer-aided design of structures; manufacturing modeling and simulation; and electronic device anal packaging technology. FUNDING OUTLOOK Adequate funding, both in terms of amounts and stability, is central to the success of engineering research.
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The latter caution introduces the issue of adequate funding for small-scale research projects involving a single investigator and perhaps one or two graduate students. This individual research can be highly effective because it is the ideal scale on which to first explore areas of high-risk engineering research.
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The average age of laboratory equipment in engineering schools is about 25 years, and only 18 percent of it is up to state-of-the-art standards. Fully one-fourth of the equipment is totally obsolete.
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Beneficial modifications of these past policies and practices are already under way, spurred on by the emerging emphasis on large, multidisciplinary research efforts that often require active industrial participation. RECOMMENDATIONS The health and vigor of engineering research in the United States is directly affected by the complex interactions among the many factors discussed previously.
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State and federal legislatures must take steps to encourage gifts of laboratory equipment to engineering schools, for example, by the passage of appropriate tax legislation or the establishment of matching fund programs. Congress should consider an earlier proposal made by the National Academy of Engineering to add a minimum of $30 million per year for the next 5 years to the budget of the NSF's Engineering Directorate for the procurement of research equipment and instrumentation.
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University administrators with the assistance of government and industrial leaders must devise programs to attract and retain talented young Ph.D.s in academic engineering research and, where appropriate, to enable established senior faculty to develop new expertise in areas more relevant to current needs. The Presidential Young Investigator program and present acadern~c sabbatical leave policies are steps in the right direction, but much more must be done, especially along the lines of providing research initiation funds and selectively reduced teaching loads for highly qualified researchers.
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Advanced engineered math rials, a designation that implies new methods of processing to obtain prespecified materials properties for specific applications, hold great promise for the creation of new products with new standards of performance in virtually every commercial field and
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Bioreactors. The annual world market for biotechnology products is expected to be about $100 billion by the year 2000, if anticipated new bioprocessing technology is developed and successfully scaled up to meet industrial requirements.
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Research is needed to provide the engineering knowledge on which to base advances not only in the traditional energy areas, including nuclear power, but also in the newer, less well-developed technologies such as coal liquifaction/gasification, beneficiation, and utilization; oil shale extraction and processing; solar energy conversion; and the conversion of low-grade or low quality fuels. L`ow-Grade Mineral Recovery.
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Of the many alarming environmental problems, most of which can be traced directly to growing industrialization and increasing population, the most pressing involves the treatment and management of hazardous materials especially toxic chemicals. Research is needed on: the movement, fate, and effects of chemicals in the environment to develop control and remediation strategies and to assess the ability of the environment itself to deal safely with the contaminants; conversion techniques, such as combustion and microbial transformation, to eliminate hazardous materials from the environment rather than storing them in it; and sensors and measurement methods to permit efficient process control and accurate assessment of environmental contamination or the progress in preventing it.
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To realize this potential, however, research must first be pursued on: nonlinear, three-dimensional analysis including the modeling of complex geometrical ejects; proportioning of structural elements, that is, the translation of structural behavior data into the physical dimensions of actual structural members; interactive computer graphics for structural design applications; and project-wide integration for carrying computer-aided design through the fabrication stage, which Is the structural equivalent of manufacturing. Manufacturing Modeling and Simulation.
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With regard to integrated circuits for computers, continued research is needed on chips using bipolar silicon logic circuits to obtain high switching speeds and on chips using very large-scale integration to obtain high circuit densities for both memory and logic functions. Of especial importance are the advances needed in fabrication methods for submicrometer-sized structures and in the development of three-dimensional devices and circuits.
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In many instances, however, the fundamental engineering principles needed to form an appropriate knowledge base for engineering applications are derived not from scientific principles or discoveries, but from research into the functional characteristics of engineering systems. Indeed, product/process development efforts sometimes yield this generic type of engineering knowledge (note the feedback loops in Figure 1~.
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16 DIRECTIONS IN ENGINEERING RESEARCH am, Science Research Inquiring Mind 1 Knowledge of Natural and Man-Made Worlds Development and Design _ production 1 _ Societal Needs and Desires r 1 it_ Engineering Research IT FIGURE 1 Engineering researchers seek new knowledge about the world of nature and the man-made world. Their ultimate objective is to improve the processes of engineering design and production, so that products and services needed and desired by society can be produced more efficiently, more economically, and with improved quality.
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As the energy sources that fuel the technological society have evolved from wood to coal, and then to fossil fuels and nuclear power, engineering researchers have provided the knowledge on which the energy conversion technologies were based. Effective, efficient transportation systems have also been developed on the basis of engineering research into elements of the vehicles themselves (automobiles, trucks, trains, ships, and aircraft)
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Structures of every kind from commercial and residential buildings to bridges, dams, and tunnels have become larger, stronger, safer, and easier to build through research into their design and construction. Because the expansion of the man-made world often has major impacts on the natural world, engineering research has also made it possible for environmental systems to lessen the harmful effects of technology on human and other life forms.
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Urban automobile transportation, parking, and terminal connections to rail, air, and marine modes could all be carried out smoothly, efficiently, safely, and conveniently under network control regardless of weather conditions and peak demands. Much construction could be automated, as well as mining and exploration operations on land and in the oceans.
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WHAT IS THE CURRENT STATUS OF ENGINEERING RESEARCH? The majority of fundamental engineering research today iscarried on in university laboratories.
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oratories, with their u~tmdate equipment and highly qualified personnel, account for an increasingly large proportion of the engineering research fundamental as well as applied- conducted in the United States.* Federal agencies provide direct funding support for most of the university work, as well as for engineering research conducted at various federal laboratories.
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This report is the first opportunity the engineering research community has had to present a broad-based, comprehensive overview of its needs and directions. It is adciressed primarily to government leaders, to industrial R&D managers, and to academic engineering researchers and administrators- the sponsors, shapers, and doers of our nation's engineering research effort.
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Eey Engineering Researth Opportunities A primary task of the Engineering Research Board was to identify especially important arid/or emerging areas of engineering research. Early in its deliberations, the board decided to approach this daunting task by forming separate panels charged with examining selected are" of research.
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The important characteristic shared by all systems regardless of their scale is the integration of various components to optimize certain desired features. Most industrial firms design and manufacture systems as their end product; indeed, most manufacturing processes are in themselves systems.
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Thus, support for the systems concept of engineering research and education in no way diminishes the need for strong traditional engineering disciplines, although it may refocus some of the emphases within those disciplines. To give but one example, modern industrial engineering has an important role to play in systems design and organization.
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advanced engineered materials. Descriptions of these three areas follow.
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Biomedical engineering is the application of engineering principles to the study of the human body to provide the knowledge needed to develop devices and procedures that can deliver better health care at lower cost. Some of its key elements are biomechanics (determining how the body responds to physical stresses)
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; advances in interactive computer graphics; and extending CAD from the design concept on through to the fabrication of the actual structure by means of a project-wide integration of what have been separate, computerized operations. ENERGY, MINERAL, AND ENVIRONMENTAL SYSTEMS Mineral resources and energy are the basic input, and environmental impacts the output, of our technological society.
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A continuous, readily available supply of energy is essential to the well-being of the nation's citizens, its industry, and its defense. Long-term investment in research is necessary to provide a diversity of energy sources that will minimize the nation's vulnerability to a loss of supply for any reason.
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Several categories of devices underlie progress in computation. One such category is integrated circuits.
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There are still important areas in which available models of materials, physical objects, and manufacturing processes are inadequate for the needs of CIM. Research is needed to define structured computer data bases for product modeling.
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MATERIALS SYSTEMS Advanced engineered materials of various kinds hold great promise for the creation of new products and new standards of performance in virtually every commercial field, as well as in military systems. The word "advanced" here implies new methods for the synthesis and processing of materials; ~engineered" refers to materials that have been created to meet property specifications desired for some end use (rather than finding end uses for materials with a set of properties fixed by nature, as was formerly done)
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OPPORTUNITIES AND NEEDS 33 TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS Although transportation systems and services account for some 20-25 percent of the U.S. gross national product, very little research is conducted on most modes of transportation.
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Great quantities of information can be stored, organized, analyzed, and displayed efficiently and effectively for decision making. To take full advantage of this marvelous tool, new engineering concepts must be developed and many new fundamental engineering principles established.
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Therefore, continuing fundamental engineering research on the computer itself and its associated component devices and materials also is essential. There is an urgent need to develop new principles of computer science and engineering, and to refine and modify older principles that now have limited validity.
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government programs fund materials science much more heavily than they do materials processing, even though processing is currently the key to a new world of engineered materials that may soon assume enormous econorn~c importance. Japan is said to be producing large numbers of materials-processing engineers—the United States is not (National Research Council, 1984~.
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From page 37... ...
This is one of the most important ways to break the bottleneck in the technology development process and take full advantage of the nation's strong science base. Issues that Determine the Health of Engineering Research In attempting to gain an overview of engineering research, the Engineering Research Board began by identifying seven subsets of engineering systems research, as described in the introduction.
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38 DIRECTIONS IN ENGINEERING RESEARCH SUMMARIES: THE HEALTH OF THE SELECTED FIELDS BIOENGINEERING Bioengineering systems encompass both biochemical engineering (the engineering aspects of biotechnology) and biomedical engineering (which is concerned with medical technology and devices)
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From page 39... ...
than there is on research in materials science. Decreasing and less accessible domestic energy and mineral reserves, along with increasing hazardous materials contamination, pose future problems to national productivity and human welfare suggesting that the health of this area should not have been allowed to decline so far or so fast as it has.
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40 DIRECTIONS IN ENGINEERING RESEARCH INFORMATION, COMMUNICATIONS, COMPUTATION, AND CONTROL Although faculty shortages continue to be a problem in most areas of engineering, tremendous student interest in this field and a big demand for researchers in industry have led to an especially severe faculty shortage in this field. To limit the problem, many schools have set enrollment ceilings in electrical engineering and computer science departments.
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TRANSPORTATION Except in the aerospace field, which benefits from substantial public-sector funding, transportation systems operate with far too little research input. Mission agencies involved in transportation devote less than 0.5 percent of their budget to research, compared with about 1 percent for other nondefense mission agencies.
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National Patterns of Science and Technology Resources, 1984 (NSF 84-311~. FUNDING ISSUES SUPPORT FOR R&D It is appropriate to begin a discussion of funding for engineering research by examining the scope of funding for all R&D.
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Fundamental engineering research fares much worse, averaging around 5 percent of all research expenditures. Part of this disparity results from the fact that science research is seen as clearly within the purview of government, whereas engineering research including even that which is fundamental in nature- is viewed as bordering on development, and thus as a private-sector responsibility.
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It is imperative that the importance of engineering research in the exploitation of our national innovative capacity be recognized by the Congress and by the mission agencies concerned with technology development. Funding for RED should be examined carefully to identify those points at which increased effort in engineering research can be applied to strengthen the knowledge base and leverage the overall federal effort in ROD.
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OPPORTUNITIES AND NEEDS 16 In o t2 Q In ID I_ ID ~ 8 I Cal in O 4 o 4 In o ~ 3 I_ I _ Ct in Ct z Z 1 z L 45 _ _~ Total Engineerlng Research (all agencies) Total Research (all agencies)
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46 DIRECTIONS IN ENGINEERING RESEARCH TABLE 3 Federal Agency Funding (Smillions) for Engineering Research (FY85, estimated)
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THE NSF'S ROLE The NSF is the federal agency responsible for supporting nondefense-oriented basic research. Support for engineering research is explicitly part of the NSF's charter, and as Figure 5 shows, it has carried out that responsibility well particularly in its support of fundamental engineering research at universities in areas not covered by the mission agencies.
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48 DIRECTIONS IN ENGINEERING RESEARCH i< DOD 39.2% NSF 37.4% \ \ I \ NASA 9.4% \ NIH \ / DOE \5.3% Y 7.8% \ / a, ~ DOA9 0.9% FIGURE 5 Federal support for fundamental engineering research at universities and colleges, by federal agency (total funding: $340.3 million, FY94, est.~. (SOURCE: National Science Foundation, 1984c.)
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The useful life span of engineering laboratory equipment is currently said to be about 10 years (and decreasing)
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Yet the problem is still very serious, and more needs to be done. Gifts of laboratory equipment to engineering school can be facilitated through legislation affecting taxes at the state andlederat levels.
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The output of new Ph.D.s, the availability of faculty to train them, and the quality of existing research talent in these fast-changing fields of engineering are all important elements in determining whether a subset of the field is able to progress rapidly and to retain a strong competitiveness with respect to the engineering efforts of other nations.
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OPPORTUNITIES AND NEEDS 4,000 Oh a: 3,000 C) a: 2,000 z z 1 ,000 He o 0 1970 1975 53 1 1 ESTIMATED '' ~ ACTUAL ~ / 1980 1985 1990 YEAR FIGURE 7 Actual and estimated engineering doctoral degrees per year.
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54 DIRECTIONS IN ENGINEERING RESEARCH due to the shortage of jobs in civil engineering and limited funding for research. Doctoral study may become a "holding pattern" under such circumstances.
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Policy Issues Regarding Support of Engineering Research The Engineering Research Board believes that strong, internationally competitive engineering research capabilities are essential to the United States' domestic and international strength. In our juclgment, U.S.
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56 90 80 70 ~ 60 Cal C, O 50 o a: 40 m 30 20 10 o DIRECTIONS IN ENGINEERING RESEARCH Some positlons positions filled ~T ,.............
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OPPORTUNITIES AND NEEDS 57 engineering, manufacturing engineering, transportation systems, construction, and many areas of communications, computation, and control systems engineering. Most daunting is the growing speed and success with which Japanese industry translates engineering research advances (from their own laboratories or those of others)
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Mission agencies are the most subject to the shifting political winds. Although the engineering research community has long recognized the magnitude of this problem, it has tended to believe that it was simply unsolvable that political realities would inevitably dominate and to hope that things would somehow work out.
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In addition, federal mission agencies tend to operate independent of one another, with a focus on their own near-term development objectives. For these and other reasons, there is a prevailing lack of coordination with regard to federal spending in many areas of engineering research.
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Nevertheless, there is a clear need for fundamental engineering research to add to the knowledge base In every field of engineering. Within agency research budgets,
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OPPORTUNITIES AND NEEDS 61 there must be ample room for high-risk, tong-range research as well as the more immediate, product-oriented research. Ways to ensure this balance might include .
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This type of research is a key to the health of the overall engineering research environment, and it is not likely to be sustained by "trickle-down" support filtering through the large, heavily funded activities. Consequently, the board urges that the general scheme of NSF sponsorship should continue to provide a major explicit emphasis on encouraging the individual engineering researcher, in balance with the new thrusts emphasizing cross-disciplinary research.
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OPPORTUNITIES AND NEEDS 63 in addition to producing fundamental research ideas and results, also produce the new research engineers and scientists needed to maintain a strong national research establishment and national economy. Thus, their role is unique and indispensable.
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ENCOURAGEMENT OF RESEARCH IN INDUSTRY Although universities have the intellectual resources, the environment, and the incentives to lead in fundamental engineering research, a great many of today's breakthroughs in that research are occurring in industrial laboratories. Abundant equipment and other resources are part of the reason; federal policies have also played a major role in facilitating industry research.
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must And a way to provide support for research initiation. This must include research funds, a reduced teaching load, aid in developing needed personal interactions with researchers in the new field, and a fair and clear standard for advancement and promotion to tenure.
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Faculty salary policies can offer an effective incentive if significant rewards are permitted to accrue to those who are successful in developing productive research and teaching in new technical areas. CROSS-DISCIPLINARY RESEARCH AND EDUCATION Every pane} represented within the Engineering Research Board's scope of study is profoundly cros~disciplinary in nature.
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One solution is for untenured faculty to have joint appointments in the traditional discipline and the new activity. There are limitations to this approach, however, because the individual has to do Trouble duty in terms of departmental citizenship; and there is a constant risk of diluting faculty research output by dividing it between the two activities.
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From page 68... ...
It is for this reason that we urge more cross-disciplinary research with a systems orientation, through such vehicles as NSF's ERCs, because so little fundamental engineering research at universities is now done in that way. We also urge continued attention to and support of those engineering researchers who prefer to pursue high-quality work in a single discipline as individual investigators or in very small groups.
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From page 69... ...
However, as described in the section "Issues that Determine the Health of Engineering Research, most engineering colleges have been unable to remain up to date in research facilities and instrumentation, or in providing the support staff to maintain and operate costly experimental facilities. Costs are so high that a majority of engineering colleges with graduate programs will have to rely on shared facilities and equipment for a portion of their experimental research.
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As we recommended in the section "Issues that Determine the Health of Engineering Research, supporting stipends for graduate students need to be at least half the engineering salary offered by industry to graduates with B.S. degrees.
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In the dual interest of increasing fundamental engineering research and improving the supply of engineering talent, industry should substantially increase its interactions with universities. These interactions can take several forms: .
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Faculty fellowships of various kinds, sponsorship of doctoral students, and other such activities also deserve the full support of industry. PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT In addition to academic researchers, the national pool of research talent also includes large numbers of experienced researchers in industry.
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From page 73... ...
Companies should also take the initiative to form new cooperative consortia along the lines of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation to advance the state of the art in lagging industries. Such joint research ventures can provide excellent mechanisms for industrial investment In needed fundamental and applied research.
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Traditionally, many university researchers have been reluctant to interact closely with their industry counterparts and to attend in a direct way to longrange industry needs. Many practicing engineers in industry, for their part, have been poorly equipped to understand the content and implications of university research findings; after entering the work force, they have had little opportunity to learn how to do so.
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Conflicts over rights to inventions and other intellectual property sometimes have blocked otherwise promising research relationships between industry and universities. In reality, only a tiny fraction of university research projects result in economically significant patents or other intellectual property.
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Office of Science and Technology Policy. Report of the White House Science Council, Federal Laboratory Review Panel.
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