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Microwave popcorn, not-from-concentrate orange juice and pest-resistant soybeans may not appear to have all that much in common. But they do. They all began in a Purdue University lab and followed a pathway that took them from the research lab to the consumer market.
While institutions like Purdue are widely recognized for scientific discovery, their role in developing new products for commercial and consumer use does not always have a high profile. Nevertheless, this process, known as technology transfer, is part of Purdue's mission.
“One of the goals of a land-grant university like Purdue is to make technology developed through research available to the public,” says Simran Trana, acting director of Purdue's Office of Technology Commercialization, which provides the linkage between the university and private companies. “Merely placing research findings in the public domain—such as publishing them in a journal or presenting them at a meeting—is not always enough to provide benefits to the public. We need to ensure that research findings become readily available in commercial form.”
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These bags of popcorn seed at the Ag Alumni Seed Improvement Association's warehouse near Romney, Ind., are ready for shipment. Technology transfer helps make seed crops developed by Purdue Agriculture researchers available to producers around the world. (Photo by Tom Campbell) |
Popcorn from Purdue
The Ag Alumni Seed Improvement Association is one of the longest-standing models for technology transfer at Purdue. The association began in the late 1930s as a conduit to provide farmers with high-quality seed at a reasonable cost, according to Marshall Martin, associate director of agricultural research programs.
"The program began with the primary objective of taking public varieties of crops developed by Purdue scientists and making them available to the seed industry for ultimate use by Indiana farmers,” Marshall says. “Today, as it was 70 years ago, the goal is to address the public good. Patenting or licensing technologies that we develop to fund research at Purdue is not our primary goal. While we do generate revenue, our primary objective is to get the results of research on campus to flow into the user community of farmers, processors and consumers.”
The Ag Alumni Seed Improvement Association continues to develop seed crops, but its primary focus is the global popcorn industry. The association is currently one of the world's top three providers of popcorn seed.
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