From the Director

Lewis Branscomb, Director Emeritus of the Science, Technology, and Public
Policy Program at the Belfer Center and Professor Emeritus at the Kennedy
School, has received a grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce for a
project he calls Understanding Private-Sector Decision Making on
Early-Stage, High-Risk, Technology-Based Projects.

The Advanced Technology Program (ATP) in the National Institute for
Standards and Technology at the Commerce Department provides cost-shared
funding to commercial firms that are hoping to bring products or processes
to market that represent radical advances in technology, and thus embody
more than the usual technical risk. ATP is funding Branscomb''s project to
learn more about how to select the best firms to receive funding through
these cooperative agreements.

ATP is seeking information that will give them sophisticated tools to help
them to choose those firms that have a reasonable chance at
commercialization (which suggests minimizing technical risk) while at the
same time supporting the development of new technologies that are
sufficiently valuable and novel to have a chance to create whole new
industries (which undoubtedly involves relatively high technical risk).
Balancing value and risk requires knowing a lot about how firms deal with
risk - which is where Branscomb''s team comes in.

The working group includes Ken Morse, Scott Shane and Matthew Utterback of
the Sloan School Entrepreneurship Center at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and Michael Roberts, Josh Lerner and other faculty of the
Harvard Business School. They will hold a series of workshops with
entrepreneurs and risk investors in order to collect and analyze
information about how these folks make decisions under conditions of
extreme uncertainty. The workshops will be held this spring and summer and
the project will produce a final report in the fall.

For information about the Advanced Technology Program, visit
http://www.atp.nist.gov. For more on the Lewis Branscomb''s research, see
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/bcsia/stpp.