In This Issue: "There's No Success Like Failure, and Failure's No Success at All"

From its inception, this journal's collective editorial mission has been to examine and attempt to explain the many variables involved in technology transfer, including the "tipping points" at which ingenuity and effort are transformed into success or failure. The resultant technology transfer models proposed by scholars and researchers who have authored articles for the journal have been either descriptive (i.e., focusing on "what is"), normative (i.e., focusing on "what should be"), or a combination of both. Also, practitioners have been more likely to focus on case studies highlighting idiosyncratic variables that constitute the "reality on the ground," while academicians tended to focus on more universal factors conceptually characteristic of a range of situations. As a result, in some situations practice appears to drive theory, and in others theory seems to drive practice. And while governments and the private sector often try to encourage and systematize technology transfer efforts through policies and programs like technology incubators, these efforts' outcomes vary as well. In the end, technology transfer is not an exact science, for many—if not most—crucial factors vary contextually. The result is a paradoxical model for technology transfer teaching and research that might easily be summarized by the epigram offered as the subtitle to this Introduction. In the words of 1960s songwriter Bob Dylan, "there's no success like failure, and failure's no success at all."¹

Two pairs of articles in this issue illustrate these uncertain realities. In the first dyad, two groups of researchers describe and evaluate corporate and governmental efforts to institutionalize technology transfer as formal business or public policy by the use of technology incubators. In the first article (A Taiwan Research Institute as a Technology Business Incubator: ITRI and Its Spin-Offs), Bin-Win Peng, Houn-Gee Chen, and Bou-Wen Lin explore the roles and services provided by the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) for development of Taiwan's high-tech industry, and describe the technology transfer activities of this organization. ITRI is a government-based, nonprofit technology business incubator, created in 1973 to cultivate new potential companies, to accelerate industrial development, and promote national economic growth. Today, Taiwan is a world-class player in semiconductors, personal computers, and many other high-tech sectors. ITRI has a track record of successfully turning research achievements into commercial enterprises, demonstrating a degree of discipline, insight, and innovation rarely seen among research institutions. Several lessons learned from this experience may help other countries organize similar technology business incubators. The technical and planning assistance provided by the parent research institute during the start-up process are essential to the success of spin-off companies; ITRI and its spin-offs have viewed the spin-off process as a comprehensive win–win situation, thereby enabling them to minimize frictions and maximize mutual benefits. But as technology development consultant Amitav Rath observes in his Notes from the Field accompanying this article, we need more detailed case studies in order to understand more clearly how such institutions can most usefully serve developing nations. As Rath notes, the national innovation systems perspective allows us to think of the place of incubators within larger systems of innovation and development—and moreover emphasizes the vital importance of local "framework" conditions to determining the outcome of technology transfer and economic development programs.

The second article in this pair, Emerging Issues in Economic Development Policy and Technology Incubators: The Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies Experience, makes a number of the same points while examining an incubator in a very different national setting. Curtis Ventriss and Michael Gurdon describe and evaluate the effectiveness of the state of Vermont's systematic incubator-based strategy for high-tech growth in a region with limited capacities, albeit one that is attempting to fill the gaps. They reach several conclusions about the variables crucial to success...