Technology Transfer

Through collaboration with industry partners, INL's Technology Transfer and Commercialization office makes available to American agencies and international organizations unique facilities and expertise. Whether the technology relates to innovative solutions to nuclear energy or improving our national security capabilities, Technology Transfer provides essential partnering mechanisms no matter what stage the technology is in.

Like all other federal laboratories, INL has a statutory, technology transfer mission to make its capabilities and technologies available to all federal agencies, to state and local governments, and to universities and industry. To fulfill this mission, INL encourages its scientific, engineering and technical staff to disclose new inventions and creations to ensure the resulting intellectual property is captured, protected and made available to others who might benefit from it.

As part of the mission, intellectual property is licensed to industrial partners for commercialization, creating jobs and delivering the benefits of federally funded technology to consumers. In other cases, unique capabilities are made available to other federal agencies or to regional small businesses to solve specific technical challenges.

Throughout its history of successful industrial partnership, INL has been leveraging its unique technical resources available through industrial partnerships. INL uses a variety of flexible partnership mechanisms to advance technology development and to establish industrial partnerships that in turn benefit INL, DOE and the partner. Some of these benefits include:

• Increased technical breadth and depth of laboratory staff available to national missions;
• Leveraged federal research, development and demonstration;
• Reduced costs to taxpayers by using funding from other sources; and
• Enhanced competitiveness for U.S. companies.