—Research statement

While at Iowa State University, I became interested in technology transfer—the movement of intellectual property from a university or private research lab to its development in industry—through my job as managing editor and writer for Iowa State University’s Virtual Reality Applications Center (VRAC). I work with faculty and staff to articulate the value of the center’s research to external stakeholders, such as industry partners and governmental funding agencies. In short, my job is to show how VRAC and Iowa State University contribute to the innovation economy. My job as a writer has provided an interesting vantage point to analyze the discourse structures of a research organization that crosses disciplinary and university boundaries as a way of doing business.

From my work at VRAC, I became interested in a second organization that was also designed to effect technology transfers in a similar way. For my dissertation, I did a case study of a new university institute that was established with a $1 million state grant to develop university/industry partnerships as a way to stimulate economic development. During my observations, the institute was struggling to define itself as a viable structure in which these partnerships could be established and flourish. One key finding is a tension between traditional conceptions of research, in which knowledge “moves” from a disciplinary boundary out to a destination, and a more entrepreneurial mode, in which knowledge production is diffuse, crossing disciplinary and university boundaries. My question is how does this university institute and its entrepreneurial mode of research gain legitimacy through the discourse? This case study highlights important trends in technology transfer, specifically in how university research is valued, how success is defined by various stakeholders, and how those definitions structure and are structured by institutional practices.

Throughout graduate school, I have studied workplace communication. My research has included case studies about a marketing writer at an engineering research center and a USDA research scientist, and the ways they used genre and narrative to articulate their research programs. My dissertation extends this work by analyzing the rhetorical devices used by an IT institute to define its value to its stakeholders. From these case studies, I plan to write a series of articles or a monograph exploring the role of language in technology transfers. For instance, how do organizations negotiate their identity, how does language structure the terms of negotiation, and how is that value historically and culturally situated? In the future, I plan to continue to do case studies of local instances of technology transfer. As Stephen Doheny-Farina (1992) argued in his book Rhetoric, Innovation, Technology, technology transfer is highly rhetorical and contingent on the experiences and worldview of those involved (p. 7). Case studies, or slices of experiences, give us a way to frame research questions that come from praxis or doing. Praxis is what Lather (1991) called the creative activity through which we make the world: “through dialogue and reflexivity, design, data and theory emerge, with data being recognized as generated from people in a relationship” (p. 72). From these relationships, researchers can begin asking questions about what the work is doing.

The following are three areas of research that I see as important trends in technology transfer:

• University partnerships. At the time of my study, the university institute in my case study was a “virtual” construct in the process of developing a research agenda and suite of services for potential industry partners and entrepreneurial start-up companies—no intellectual property exchanged hands, no technologies were involved. Future work might include case studies of university institutes/research centers at different stages of development. Questions might include: how do these organizations differ in the ways they define technology transfer, and are there certain patterns and variables for articulating the value of their product to various stakeholders? Such an analysis can point to how such local instances fit into larger sets of practices.
• Education.  At a recent conference, one industry attendee defined himself as a dissatisfied customer of universities, arguing that the university was failing to provide students who are ready to engage in the skills needed to do high-end engineering. As a result, his company has looked to China, India, and many parts of Europe as a resource for talent. In this instance, technology transfer is not just about the transfer of ideas. It is also about helping students develop the skills needed in their jobs. Qualitative research and interaction with industry partners can further dialogue about the learning objectives at specific institutions, particularly in the communication skills engineers need as well as those of professional communicators.
• Public policy. For their September 2008 meeting, the IEEE Central Iowa brought in a Washington lobbyist to discuss public policy, including current legislation in Congress about STEM education funding and patent reform, and the ways engineers can communicate effectively with elected leaders. I want to look at the ways those in science and engineering interact with governmental agencies so those in state and federal government can make sound decisions about funding technologies that are increasingly embedded in our everyday lives.

At the heart of these research projects is language. As Kenneth Burke (1966) said, “In brief, much that we take as observations about ‘reality’ may be but the spinning out of possibilities implicit in our particular choice of terms” (p. 46). Rhetorical analysis makes explicit the implicit assumptions and arguments of a given terminology. The assumptions and arguments in technology transfer also position its practices in a historical and cultural context. As a researcher, I have a responsibility to move beyond analysis to also articulate solutions to problems. Rhetorical theory provides a way of understanding how these discourses are “grounded” in language as a way to move forward; in this way, theory and practice have a symbiotic relationship, in which one pushes our understanding of the other. Qualitative case studies provide the slices of experience that promote the dialogue needed to move our conversations forward.

References

Burke, K. (1966). Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and method. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Doheny-Farina, S. (1992). Rhetoric, innovation, technology: Case studies of technical communication in technology transfer. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Lather, P. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York: Routledge.