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community. in each issue of Communications, we’ll publish
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DOI: 10.1145/2001269.2001273
http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm
from idea to Product;
how schools of
education can help cs

the risks and costs associated with the new idea. No single mechanism is guaranteed to succeed, although there are many mechanisms that are likely to fail.

Daniel Reed discusses how researchers communicate their project
ideas to companies and product groups and get them successfully
adopted. Mark Guzdial considers whether schools of education
could create more high school CS teachers.

Daniel Reed ”technology transfer: a contact sport” http://cacm.acm.org/ blogs/blog-cacm/99627 october 4, 2010

It is fall and football season in the United States. We are still playing soccer too—football everywhere else—but that is another story. American football has long been called a contact sport, meaning the players intentionally collide to move the ball toward the goal line. However, it remains a far cry from rugby, which to my untrained eye seems indistinguishable from unarmed combat.

How, one may wonder, does football relate to technology transfer? For that matter, what do I mean by the phrase “technology transfer” itself? There are broader definitions, but for the sake of discussion, let’s define technology transfer as the mechanism via which research ideas are communicated to and adopted by companies and their product groups.

The success or failure of technology transfer depends on many factors, from the personalities and skills of the people involved, through the timing and appropriateness of the offering, to

DanieL ReeD
“in the embedding
model, researchers
become members
of the product
team, working
side by side on the
product in the same
environment as the
product developers.”
sharing the Love