Technological Transfer Based Approaches to Local Economic Development

A great deal has been made of the movement of low end jobs off-shore to places where lower environmental standards enable manufacturing companies to lower production costs, and cheap labor enables a reduction in labor costs. Industrialized nations like Canada are faced with a problem of developing new industries which are less likely to shift off-shore, so that the overall national economy has some way of continuing to support its citizens, an life in Canada can carry on.

Nations all over the world are facing the same issue and are responding in an ingenious way. Governments have decided to assist in the "re-tooling" of their countries in order to foster the development of products which cannot be made by low priced labor and therefore shipped off-shore, and that capitalize on the massive output of research and development that has been emerging in Government labs and public Universities.

In order to help in this process, Government has sought to find ways to facilitate the interfacing of public and private sector in partnership agreements of one sort or another. When one scans he web for sites relating to this sort of activity one is overwhelmed with the sheer enormity of the activity worldwide. The impression one gets is that of walking through a midway having hawkers beckoning to "step right up, three tosses for a quarter".

This section of the site examines three of the aspects of this activity of "technological transfer" that are taking place and indicates a number of interesting sites related to that activity in order to facilitate an exploration of these options for activities designed to develop a local economy.

Tech Transfer can be approached from three directions when considering it in terms of local economic development.

  1. innovation of new products and processes themselves
  2. managing technological change wisely
  3. Technological transfer process opportunities and realities.

Technology Transfer and Ec. Dev.

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