The commercialization of federally sponsored technological innovations

In a study of 40 federally sponsored innovation projects from five government agencies (UMTA, MARAD, DOE, NSF, and EPA), 35 of these cases had complete data on all variables for path analysis. Significantly, it was found that the probability of commercial succes of these innovations is predicted by the degree to which the innovations incorporate incremental as opposed to radically new technology (p<0.01), the pricing potential of the product or process (p<0.05) and the ease of introduction and implementation of the innovation (p<0.05). These three variables were found to account for 59% of the valid variance in potential commercial success. The project market potential, surprisingly, did not predict the probability of commercial success. It seems likely that the high percentage of projects in the sample that fell between certain commercial success and failure or were unresolved commercially could account for this result. No significant differences were found across the five agencies or the dependent variables of the study.