How can labs tackle the perennial R&D challenge—the often long and winding road to deploying a technology commercially? They can look to the decision sciences to obtain a good understanding of the factors that influence the pathway and develop a well-defined route.
Ames Laboratory has partnered with Decision Frameworks, a Houston-based company specializing in Decision Quality enablement, to enhance the navigation of the commercialization process for the Critical Materials Institute (CMI). Together they are working with researchers and industry in a collaborative manner to employ a Strategic Opportunity Framing Process. The goal is to define alternative viable pathways to commercialization, qualitatively assess them and develop a market-informed technology maturation “road map”. The roadmaps guide continued maturation of the technology within CMI and identify opportunities for maturation beyond CMI.
This webinar introduces Decision Quality and the Strategic Opportunity Framing process, while describing its successful application and benefits applied to two technologies. The first focused on determining a partnership strategy to advance into the electronic waste sector the protein based biosorption technology that extracts rare earth elements from dilute solutions being developed by a team led by Yongqin Jiao and Dan Park at LLNL (FA 3). The second focused on establishing the top (1-3) markets into which CMI-developed permanent magnets should be deployed, an FA 2 activity, involving team members from both Ames and ORNL.