Announcement of Requirements and Registration for National Institute of Standards and Technology Prize Competition-Federal Impact Assessment Challenge

Résumé

In 2011, President Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum-- Accelerating Technology Transfer and Commercialization of Federal Research in Support of High-Growth Businesses--which called on Federal agencies to establish performance goals, metrics, evaluation methods, and implementation plans to improve the effectiveness of Federal technology transfer activities. The President's charge has stimulated agency interest in studies that assess the impact of technologies transferred from Federal laboratories. In an effort to encourage research in this area, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Journal of Technology Transfer present a Federal Impact Assessment (FIA) Challenge for researchers to develop impact studies of Federal technology transfer activities. The FIA Challenge calls on researchers to perform original retrospective studies that assess the impact of federally developed technologies that (1) have been developed completely or in part by Federal researchers working at any Federal agency at any time over the past 30 years, and (2) have been transferred to an entity other than the agency which developed the technology.