LONDON, England (CNN) -- Technological advances are all around us, everything from increasingly powerful personal computers to the latest in disease-beating drugs.
However, coming up with a great new concept and making money from it -- as many bankrupt inventors and innovators over the decades could tell you -- are two entirely different matters.
This is something business schools are increasingly aware of, and many of them now have special departments intended to not only help technological innovators profit from their developments but also assist established corporations to keep pace with the dizzying pace of change.
A pioneer in this was the Management of Technology Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, initially established in 1981 as a joint program between the university's engineering department and its highly-rated Sloan management school.
Intended for experienced staff in technology-based companies and organizations, the qualification has since then, according to the school, "taught hundreds of engineers to assess, mine, and market technological enterprises."
These days, technology management MBAs are available around the globe, including one at the University of Washington Business School in the high-tech hub of Seattle, which boasts of preparing managers for "leadership in the rapidly evolving technology sector" to a similar qualification at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand.
However, such is the complexity of many new innovations that even this specialization is being broken down further.
Tanaka Business School in the UK already offers courses on the bio-pharma and health technology sectors in its one-year MBA program.
Now, it has just announced a pioneering professorship in technology transfer in the physical sciences, the likes of physics and engineering.
Addressing a need
Professor Erkko Autio, from Finland, is the first incumbent in the post, which is financed jointly by a UK government funding agency for the physical sciences and QinetiQ -- pronounced "kinetic" -- a defense technology company created in July 2001 when the UK government's official defense research agency was privatized.
The chair has been set up at Tanaka -- part of London University's Imperial College, which specializes in science and medicine -- to address the lack of research into the most effective methods of commercializing ideas in engineering and the physical sciences.
Autio has been tasked with looking at how companies and academic institutions exploit existing ideas in the physical sciences and examine how this can be expanded to cover new markets.
"Innovation in engineering and the physical sciences plays a key role in driving economic growth but the process appears to take longer and be more challenging than in the life sciences," he notes.
"The importance of technology transfer for growth in the British and global economy cannot be stressed enough," adds Professor David Gann, head of Tanaka's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group.
"This chair will develop new business models and policies for improving the effectiveness with which knowledge from engineering and physical sciences can be commercialized and deployed in industry."
However, coming up with a great new concept and making money from it -- as many bankrupt inventors and innovators over the decades could tell you -- are two entirely different matters.
This is something business schools are increasingly aware of, and many of them now have special departments intended to not only help technological innovators profit from their developments but also assist established corporations to keep pace with the dizzying pace of change.
A pioneer in this was the Management of Technology Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, initially established in 1981 as a joint program between the university's engineering department and its highly-rated Sloan management school.
Intended for experienced staff in technology-based companies and organizations, the qualification has since then, according to the school, "taught hundreds of engineers to assess, mine, and market technological enterprises."
These days, technology management MBAs are available around the globe, including one at the University of Washington Business School in the high-tech hub of Seattle, which boasts of preparing managers for "leadership in the rapidly evolving technology sector" to a similar qualification at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand.
However, such is the complexity of many new innovations that even this specialization is being broken down further.
Tanaka Business School in the UK already offers courses on the bio-pharma and health technology sectors in its one-year MBA program.
Now, it has just announced a pioneering professorship in technology transfer in the physical sciences, the likes of physics and engineering.
Addressing a need
Professor Erkko Autio, from Finland, is the first incumbent in the post, which is financed jointly by a UK government funding agency for the physical sciences and QinetiQ -- pronounced "kinetic" -- a defense technology company created in July 2001 when the UK government's official defense research agency was privatized.
The chair has been set up at Tanaka -- part of London University's Imperial College, which specializes in science and medicine -- to address the lack of research into the most effective methods of commercializing ideas in engineering and the physical sciences.
Autio has been tasked with looking at how companies and academic institutions exploit existing ideas in the physical sciences and examine how this can be expanded to cover new markets.
"Innovation in engineering and the physical sciences plays a key role in driving economic growth but the process appears to take longer and be more challenging than in the life sciences," he notes.
"The importance of technology transfer for growth in the British and global economy cannot be stressed enough," adds Professor David Gann, head of Tanaka's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group.
"This chair will develop new business models and policies for improving the effectiveness with which knowledge from engineering and physical sciences can be commercialized and deployed in industry."
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