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Prior research details the large gap that exists in the technological transfer of innovation between HBCUs and non-HBCUs. This is compounded by HBCUs being under-resourced and having a reduced focus on research and innovation. Several federal and private organizations are funding HBCU innovators aimed at transforming them into revenue-generating entrepreneurs. One of such federally funded programs, the NSF-CREST Center for Nanotechnology Research Excellence in the University of the District of Columbia is promoting innovation and intellectual property generation at HBCUs. Another federally funded program, NSF I-Corps focuses on training HBCUs innovators on the commercialization of innovations. The training aims at identifying key customer segments through interviews. This paper discusses how our innovation, the Pumpless Solar Thermal Air Heater functions and how we are promoting its commercialization using the NSF I-Corps customer discovery strategy.
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Exploring Technology Evolution Pathways to Facilitate Technology Management: From a Technology Life Cycle Perspective
Technological innovation is a dynamic process that spans the lifecycle of an idea, from scientific research to production. Within this process, there are few key innovations that significantly impact a technology’s development, and the ability to identify and trace the development of these key innovations comes with a great payoff for researchers and technology managers. In this paper, we present a framework for identifying the technology’s main evolutionary pathway of a technology. What is unique about this framework is that we introduce new indicators that reflect the connectivity and the modularity in the interior citation network to distinguish between the stages of a technology’s development. We also show how information about a family of patents can be used to build a comprehensive patent citation network. Last, we apply integrated approaches of main path analysis (MPA) -- namely global main path analysis and global key-route main analysis -- for extracting technological trajectories at different technological stages. We illustrate this approach with Dye-Sensitized Solar Cells (DSSCs), a low-cost solar cell belonging to the group of thin film solar cells, contributing to the remarkable growth in the renewable energy industry. The results show how this approach can trace the main development trajectory of a research field and distinguish key technologies to help decision-makers manage the technological stages of their innovation processes more effectively.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1759960
- PAR ID:
- 10133022
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management
- ISSN:
- 0018-9391
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 13
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/TEM.2020.2966171
