Technology transfer: Half-way houses. No. 17

In the fall of 1993, 1 was asked by the Center for National Security Studies (CNSS) of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to study the ways in which technology transfer and defense conversion had been accomplished at General Atomics (GA) and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) by interviewing Harold Agnew, who had served as director of Los Alamos before becoming president of General Atomics in 1979, and J. Robert Beyster, who had been a staff member at Los Alamos and at General Atomics before founding SAIC in 1969. Harold Agnew readily complied with my request for an interview and also suggested that I talk to Douglas Fouquet, who is in charge of public relations at General Atomics and is their unofficial historian. Robert Beyster was not available for an interview, but, through the courtesy of John C. Hopkins, a former director of CNSS, I was able to interview SAIC`s executive vice president, Donald M. Kerr, who is also a former director at Los Alamos, and Steven Rockwood, a sector vice president at SAIC who was formerly a staff member at the Laboratory Because Agnew, Kerr, and Rockwood are all familiar with LANL, as well as with their respective companies, the interviews becam exercises In comparative analyses of technology transfer. In what follows, I have tried to summarize both the interviews and some of the research which attended them. It is the historian`s hope that by use of comparative institutional analyses, Laboratory administrators may learn something of value in directing their efforts toward the transfer of technology to private industry and other government agencies