By Mojdeh Bahar and Robert J. Griesbach
In his book, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey divides tasks and their relation to time management into four quadrants arranged in a two-by-two grid. The top row represents the most important tasks, while the left column represents the most urgent tasks. The first quadrant, in the upper left, captures tasks that are both urgent and important, such as crises or deadline driven projects and pressing problems. The second quadrant on the upper right covers non-urgent yet important tasks such as planning, relationship building, preparation for meetings and presentations. The last two quadrants, in the bottom row, cover non-important but urgent tasks such as some emails, phone calls and non-important and non-urgent tasks such as busy work, junk mail, time wasters, respectively.
Technology transfer professionals in most organizations are called upon when bumps in the road are encountered; for example, when there is a dispute Time Modelover inventorship or ownership for an invention, or problems with materials received from a scientific collaborator. Thus, technology transfer is usually in the first quadrant. Our goal at the Department of Agriculture is to move TT from quadrant I to II, or from crisis management to strategic planning. (
Since the passage of the Federal Technology Transfer Act, tech transfer at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has usually been addressed well after a research project is underway. As a result, TT may either not reach desired impact, or arrive at the scene when the technology is commercially non-viable or scientifically obsolete. In order to better help our ARS scientists reach the full impact of their research, we have proposed a different paradigm.