Note from the Editors

With this issue, we mark the beginning of the fifth year of publication of Comparative Technology Transfer and Society (CTTS). The editors are gratified to have reached this milestone, which validates our original desire to examine the movement, adoption, and adaptation of new technologies (broadly defined) as they cross organizational and institutional boundaries. We are especially pleased that a particular aspect of our original goals has been met: the intention to publish examinations from the viewpoints of many different academic fields and disciplines and from a variety of national perspectives. We will continue our efforts in this direction with this fifth volume of the journal. Thus, the content of this issue includes articles from both historians and management scholars residing in the United States and in the Netherlands. And we are pleased that the August 2007 issue of CTTS will be devoted to the papers of a symposium presented originally by the Lemelson Center of the Behring National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. The topic of the symposium, "Cultures of Innovation," was intended to explore a theme that is central to CTTS: How can emerging societies develop the social and cultural climate that encourages invention and innovation? Technology transfer played an important role in those discussions, which were conducted by scholars from the United Kingdom, India, Canada, and the United States, about events in India, Africa, and the developing world generally. We are delighted that several papers from the symposium will appear in our next issue.

The editors also want to take this opportunity to recognize the significant assistance we have had in our efforts, from the authors whose articles we have published, from numerous reviewers who have helped improve those articles, and from our editorial board members. We have enjoyed marvelous assistance from the wonderful staff of the journals division at The Johns Hopkins University Press. And above all, we have received solid financial and organizational backing of sponsors at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, including the Colorado Institute for Technology Transfer and Implementation (CITTI) and its director Jeremy Haefner; Dr. Pamela Shockley-Zalabak, chancellor of the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs; and El Pomar Foundation. This support has been essential as we continue building this journal.

As we enter our fifth year, CTTS is embarking upon another step that furthers a goal articulated at the origin of the journal—namely, developing a routine dialogue between academic scholars (especially in the social sciences) and professionals engaged in the actual process of technology transfer. Many of these professionals work in university settings, and we have published several articles dealing with universities and technology transfer in past issues. The importance of technology transfer within and from universities is confirmed by the recent article by Goldie Blumenstyk, "A Tight Grip on Technology Transfer," in The Chronicle of Higher Education (September 15, 2006) that reported on a controversy surrounding the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and its role in controlling the use of cell lines and patents that it owns in the field of stem cells. We are very pleased to announce that during the course of 2007, we will launch a collaboration with the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) designed to allow AUTM members to subscribe to the journal as part of their AUTM membership. We are very excited at the prospect of this new relationship. The details of this collaboration are still being worked out as this issue goes to press, so we will explain the relationship and its connection to CTTS in more detail in our next issue. But the editors are certain that it will open a new dimension to our attempt to explore the nature of the diffusion of technology and knowledge across and through single institutions. We look forward to developing this new connection in ways that will further our editorial mission.