Partnering Against Terrorism Summary of a Workshop (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Panel II: Best Practice Examples of Public-Private Partnerships
Panel II: Best Practice Examples of Public-Private Partnerships
Pages 38-65
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From page 38... ...
He praised Gordon Moore as a member of "the nation's pantheon of technologists," having "charted the semiconductor industry's course" in the information revolution and co-founded and led the company "that helped put the revolution into high gear." All along, he said, Dr. Moore championed the strategic importance of maintaining a strong national platform for innovation, which was now an asset fundamental to the successful response to the challenge of terrorism.
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From page 39... ...
That partnership, he said, underscored the dual nature of many of the technologies that were now needed. Many partners outside NIST were contributing to the homeland security work underway in NIST laboratories, with an emphasis on responding to measurement and standards-related needs.
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From page 40... ...
The investigation was part of a broader NIST response to the World Trade Center disaster.
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From page 41... ...
As a single manufacturing industry, he said, the semiconductor industry was then approaching 1 percent of GDP; the entire manufacturing sector in the U.S. accounted for 1718 percent of GDP.
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From page 42... ...
. Percent/Year Microprocessors, 1975-85 -37.5 Hedonic Index 1985-94 -26.7 Intel Microprocessors, Fisher Matched Model, Quarterly Data 93:1-95:4 -47.0 95:4-99:4 -61.6 DRAM Memory, 1975-85 -40.4 Fisher Matched Model 1985-94 -19.9 DRAMs, Fisher Matched Model, Quarterly Data 91:2-95:4 -11.9 95:4-98:4 -64.0 FIGURE 2 Economic impacts: Decline rates in price-performance.
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From page 43... ...
and a few other firms changed the semiconductor market by specializing in the manufacture of custom wafers under contract to chip designers. This freed the designers to concentrate on making and marketing the integrated circuits formed on the wafers to form microchips and helped spark an explosion of "fabless" microchip companies, such as those that populate Silicon Valley and the high-tech zone around Taipei.
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From page 44... ...
This is a high-cost activity; those who attempt it have to accept that a certain amount of "leakage" will spill over to other firms. A Review of Moore's Law Another important event in the history of the semiconductor was "Moore's law." He recalled that Gordon Moore in 1965 published a paper in an IEEE journal suggesting that the density of devices on a chip would approximately double every 12 months for the next several years (see Figure 3)
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From page 45... ...
Even though President Reagan traditionally opposed public interventions in the free market, the Republican administration took a favorable view of the partnership that became SEMATECH, as did the semiconductor firms themselves. It is fair to say, according to Dr.
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From page 46... ...
Perhaps most importantly, said Dr. Flamm, the advance of productivity in the semiconductor industry accelerated dramatically in the late 1990s, after the major strategies of SEMATECH were installed.
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From page 47... ...
In many respects, the partnership is an institutional innovation that will live on long after SEMATECH itself it is no longer necessary." Dr. Bement added that NIST had had a long partnership with SEMATECH, not only providing inputs for their roadmapping, but also taking NIST projects from the roadmap.
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From page 48... ...
ATP, a publicprivate partnership program, had held 42 competitions that generated nearly 5,000 proposals and resulted in 602 "highly competitive" awards; less than 20 percent of the projects received funding (see Figure 5)
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From page 49... ...
Thanks to the rigorous peer-review followed by ATP, the researchers could track the proposals on the basis of technical scores given by reviewers. This allowed them to see if the ATP selected the kinds of high-risk projects that could not proceed without a government subsidy.
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From page 50... ...
However, the firms that received awards seemed to develop a "halo," meaning these firms were able to attract three times the funding from venture capital firms and other private-market sources as the control group of firms with the same characteristics.
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From page 51... ...
In fact, she said, the two worlds can interact productively in ways that are relevant to partnering against terrorism. She had been impressed by how many academic people at her own institution were looking for ways, in the wake of September 11, to adapt their own research activities to the new and pressing needs of their nation.
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From page 52... ...
In recent years, the Pittsburgh foundations have supported a variety of new programs designed to help the community capitalize on the quality of its universities to revitalize the economy. Connecting university research more closely with the market where jobs can be created is a goal Pittsburgh shares with many regions around the country.
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From page 53... ...
Collaboration with the university continues to be strong, and Pittsburgh is developing as a hub for the information storage industry, with university spin-off companies also being created as a result of the ERC. Most of the economic activity has been supported by the private
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From page 54... ...
sector, but the early federal dollars invested in this peer-reviewed center award was the catalyst that made this growth possible. The Learning Curve of Tech Transfer To stimulate the contributions that Carnegie Mellon technologies can make to economic growth, the university has restructured its technology transfer function.
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From page 55... ...
There are too few of these "home-run hits," she said, to justify tech transfer offices for most universities on purely financial grounds (see Figure 9)
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From page 56... ...
For a $100 million research budget, bringing in $3 million in royalties and capital gains revenue "should be considered a very good result," she said. "But don't hope or expect that you'll do even that well routinely." During Carnegie Mellon's reassessment of its tech transfer function, the university group first asked a large number of experienced people what they thought was wrong with the process and how it ought to work instead.
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From page 57... ...
While Pittsburgh was not the booming economy of Silicon Valley or Boston, it had by then gathered a substantial population of experienced lawyers, accoun 30 25 Licensing Revenue Capital Gains 20 Dollars) Proceeds of 15 Gross (Millions 10 5 0 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 Fiscal Year FIGURE 11 Carnegie Mellon tech transfer revenue.
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From page 58... ...
The Power of Group Process Perhaps the most important shift in tech transfer design was suggested by the influence that Nobel Laureate Herbert A Simon has had on Carnegie Mellon.
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From page 59... ...
The TRP, she recalled, was politically charged from its first implementation, dividing those who saw an urgent need to use private-sector advances and the "dual-use" concept to strengthen the defense industry sector and those who believed the program was primarily trying to move spending away from defense to commercially directed applications. As the program began, she said, one of the greatest needs was to break down the walls that divided different program offices in different government agencies funding work in similar technology areas.
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From page 60... ...
It would be nice to know that whenever there's an urgent national need, you could get an interagency group like this together to find and fund the best collaborative work quickly, without turf getting in the way." She closed by noting the value of other major federal-private partnership programs designed to stimulate technological innovation and economic growth, such as NIST's Advanced Technology Program and the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program.11 The SBIR set-aside program, for example, she said, has helped a large number of new technology companies create and commercialize innovations much more quickly than could have been done within large companies.
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From page 61... ...
In the same manner, public-private partnerships can advance the pace of technology in ways that neither federal agencies nor private firms alone can do: by overcoming roadblocks that block development and innovation; by focusing creative thinking on national needs that would otherwise go unmet; by compensating for market gaps or imperfections; and by producing significant social benefits that an individual firm or sector would be unlikely to achieve. He noted that the United States had had a long history of public-private collaborations, dating back perhaps to Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures, and certainly as far as the Morrell Act of 1862, when the government established the land-grant universities and the agricultural extension service to assist private farmers.
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From page 62... ...
He said that virtually no venture capital company had ever funded a company that exactly followed the business plan originally used to secure funding. The key to a successful venture, he said, is to support people who can adjust flexibly to new markets, new technologies, and unexpected experimental results.
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From page 63... ...
"If we do this right," he concluded, "by learning lessons from past publicprivate partnerships and applying them systematically to build the best biodefense capability, we also have the hope of improving our civilian health system and generating commercial leadership across a range of new technologies. We should consider the presentations today, and the panel, to be a modest but essential contribution to getting it right." DISCUSSION Anne Solomon, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, commented that the relationship between partnerships and commercial markets was complex, and wondered what kinds of markets there would be for some of the technologies produced.
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From page 64... ...
Bement added that the issue of product liability was central to the mission of NIST in the sense that standards and measurements are fundamental to improving reliability and reducing risk. "The whole infrastructure in standards development," he said, "is pretty much aimed at reducing product liability." Also, he said, even though public sector intervention is normally intended to address "market failure," this is a very subjective term.
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From page 65... ...
He asked whether it would be profitable to partner with the Japanese, in the assumption that the Sarin attack had served as a "technology accelerator." He also asked how publicprivate partnerships might be arranged with Japan, especially in the context of the planned global disaster information network.
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