This award was made to support the foreign travel costs of eight U.S.resarchers to attend a NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) in Acquafredda, Italy. The topic of the workshop is "Academic-Industry Relations." The P.I., Dr. Henry Etzkowitz, is responsible for organizing attendance at and participation in the workshop by top American researchers in this field. The aims of the ARW are to exchange information and stimulate new research in the areas of: organizational innovations in academic-industry R&D alignments; science and industrial policy intersections in regional, newly industrializing, and post-socialist contexts; and development of broadly accesible data bases for comparative research. The value of the workshop, which brings together researchers from all around the world, is to bring a large body of existing research results and knowledge to the attention of the most pre-eminent investigators in the field of academic- industry research relations, revealing the possibilities for combining their efforts synergistically. A great deal is already known, through experientially-based surveys and through structured, theory-based research studies, about how innovation occurs and knowledge is transmitted in academic-industry research interactions. However, this body of knowledge has yet to be organized and, to the extent feasible, codified in ways that would make it widely and easily accessible to the S&T community, both for implementation and further research. Benefits to the U.S. will be in the form of gaining knowledge of competing, and different, approaches to university-industry partnerships.
