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Tech Transfer Meeting Held at NOAO (1Jun94) (from KPNO, NOAO Newsletter No. 38, 1 June 1994) Recent Federal legislation and Executive Orders have encouraged federally funded facilities such as NOAO/KPNO to share their scientific and technical innovations. As a result, AURA and its observatories are actively exploring partnerships and collaborative ventures that could lead to profitable marketing of NOAO developed technology by industrial companies or corporations. The staff at NOAO/KPNO believes that there is a renewed interest in small state-of-the-art telescopes (here defined as apertures 2-m or smaller) and believes that there exists an attractive business opportunity for US industry. A meeting was held in Tucson on 22 April 1994 with a number of companies now active in small telescope technology, as well as with several representatives from a number of organizations interested in procuring such telescopes when funding is available, to assess their level of interest in potentially joining with NOAO in an alliance to design, fabricate, and market high quality small telescopes. Such telescopes are part of NOAO's future, so there is a significant interest in insuring a market for quality, relatively low-cost, new generation small telescopes. The full day meeting was attended by all but one of the invited companies, resulting in an open and effective dialog on the value of such telescopes and their future market. It is clear that most of the companies were interested in the tech transfer potentials and that additional meetings of this sort will be forthcoming. We anticipate that the result of such discussions to be a tech transfer partnership of AURA/NOAO with one or more such companies. The progress of this and other tech transfer activities will be reported in future Newsletter articles. Dave Crawford
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