The plan to create onsite partnerships is interesting for several reasons. In recent years, federal agencies have tried various strategies to launch their technologies into the marketplace, with varying success. Not the least of the park's assets is its location in the heart of Silicon Valley. Ames brings to that plan its own substantial expertise in each of the three mission triangle fields, as well as 2,000 acres of land that includes undeveloped space and unused structures. The crux of Ames' strategic plan is the formation of a “research park” 3 at the Ames facility that will feature a network of partnerships with private research firms and major universities. Its strategic challenge is to integrate those research areas into a new “mission triangle” for the 21 st century.Īmes' objective is to make use of its extensive human and physical resources in ways that are both consistent with NASA's overall mission goals and effective at leveraging its own particular research capabilities and exceptional location. To execute that shift, the agency plans to realign its own research mix by focusing on three cutting-edge areas-biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology. And the development of tomorrow's technologies has shifted, in the words of NASA's chief scientist, toward “highly complex, first-of-a-kind missions which cannot be accomplished or afforded using current systems.” 1 Within NASA, for example, the space agency's mission now includes an increased emphasis on commercializing technologies that are developed by agency scientists and engineers. This task is changing the strategies of federal agencies in fundamental ways. As the nation's attention has turned from the tensions of the Cold War to an intensely competitive global environment, federal agencies are challenged to find productive new ways to utilize their highly skilled human resources and their extensive-sometimes unique-physical assets. For the federal government, a significant task of the new century is realigning the missions of its major science and technology laboratories.
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