La gestion de la propriété intellectuelle dans les relations entre l'université et l'entreprise : revue des expériences au Québec, au Canada et à l'international. Document d'accompagnement

Le Conseil de la science et de la technologie vient de mettre en ligne La gestion de la propriété intellectuelle dans les relations entre l'université et l'entreprise : revue des expériences au Québec, au Canada et à l'international.

Ce document, produit en appui à l'avis que vient de diffuser le Conseil, La gestion de la propriété intellectuelle dans les relations entre l'université et l'entreprise : Pour une véritable dynamique d'alliances stratégiques, décrit et commente les principales données pertinentes en matière de valorisation de la recherche et de la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle pour le Québec, le Canada, l'Allemagne, les États-Unis, la Finlande, Israël, le Japon et Singapour. Il reprend également des extraits du dernier document de l'OCDE sur les perspectives 2010 en science, technologie et industrie.

MODÈLES DE RÉUSSITE DES COLLABORATIONS UNIVERSITÉ-ENTREPRISE AU QUÉBEC DANS UN CONTEXTE D'INNOVATION OUVERTE

Le Conseil de la science et de la technologie vient de mettre en ligne le rapport Modèles de réussite des collaborations université-entreprise au Québec dans un contexte d'innovation ouverte. Ce document, à partir de quatre études de cas ( IREQ, Ericsson, Technar et Kinova) et d'une revue de littérature, fait ressortir les pratiques gagnantes de collaboration entre le monde de la recherche universitaire et celui de l'industrie en accordant une attention particulière à la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle.

Le rapport a été préparé à la demande du Conseil, dans la foulée de son avis récent sur la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle, par Mme Isabelle Deschamps, professeure en gestion de l'innovation ainsi que Mmes Maria Macedo et Manon Hélie, candidates à la maîtrise, toutes trois de l'École de technologie supérieure.

ACCOMPAGNER LES PME DANS LEURS COLLABORATIONS UNIVERSITAIRES : RÔLE DES INTERMÉDIAIRES ET OUTILS DE GESTION DE LA PROPRIÉTÉ INTELLECTUELLE

Le Conseil de la science et de la technologie vient de mettre en ligne le rapport synthétique, Accompagner les PME dans leurs collaborations universitaires : rôle des intermédiaires et outils de gestion de la propriété intellectuelle.

Le rapport a été préparé à la demande du Conseil, dans la foulée de son avis récent sur la gestion de la propriété intellectuelle, par Mme Isabelle Deschamps, professeure en gestion de l'innovation ainsi que Mmes Maria Macedo et Manon Hélie, candidates à la maîtrise, toutes trois de l'École de technologie supérieure.

Ontario set to spend $13.5 billion on transport, health and education
Ontario's opposition NDP party agreed on May 21 to back the governing Liberals' Budget for 2013, averting an election and clearing the way for plans for infrastructure spending to move ahead.

World experts visit Saskatchewan's carbon capture plant
Over 80 people from around the world are visiting Saskatchewan's carbon capture project at the Boundary Dam coal power generating station in Estevan over the next few days.

Lift bridge in Placentia has to be durable
Placentia, the historic French capital of Newfoundland, is about to have a new lift bridge to replace the existing Sir Ambrose Shea Lift Bridge that has been a prominent site since 1961.

Solving a semiconductor riddle
Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) continue to transform technology, whether it’s through the high-resolution glow of flat-screen televisions or light bulbs that last for years. The high efficiency and versatility of LEDs make them increasingly popular, but their full potential remains limited, in part because of remaining mysteries about the exact light-emission mechanism in the semiconducting materials.

One significant controversy surrounds the reason for the high-intensity light output from a leading LED semiconductor material, indium gallium nitride (InGaN): Researchers have been split on whether or not indium-rich clusters form within the material and provide the LED’s remarkable efficiency. Now, researchers from MIT and Brookhaven National Laboratory have demonstrated definitively that clustering is not the cause. The results, published online in Applied Physics Letters, advance fundamental understanding of LED technology and could open new research pathways.

“This discovery helps solve a significant mystery in the field of LED research, and demonstrates breakthrough experimental techniques that can advance other sensitive and cutting-edge electronics,” says Silvija Gradečak, the Thomas Lord Associate Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and a co-author on the study. “The work brings us closer to truly mastering solid-state technologies that could supply light and energy with unprecedented efficiency.”

Mastering those technologies could have significant consequences: Gradečak points out that about 14 percent of electricity generated in the United States is used for lighting, so a dramatic increase in the efficiency of lighting could help bring about a corresponding reduction in electricity usage.

Building a better bulb

Conventional incandescent light bulbs convert only about 5 percent of their energy into visible light, with the rest lost as heat. Fluorescent lights push that efficiency up to about 20 percent, still wasting 80 percent of the electricity used. In both cases, light is the byproduct of heat-generating reactions, rather than the principal effect, making them inherently inefficient.

“Solid-state lights convert electric current directly into photons,” says Eric Stach, leader of the Electron Microscopy Group at Brookhaven’s Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) and a co-author on the study. “The efficiency of this process could, in theory, be nearly perfect, but the experimental realization has not reached those levels. That disconnect helped motivate this study.”

InGaN is particularly promising for practical LED applications, but there was “a longstanding mystery of why this material was so bright, despite the fact it contains a very high density of structural defects,” Gradečak says. Some researchers had analyzed the material with electron microscopes, which use powerful electron beams, and found indium-rich clusters within the material. While some thought those were the cause of the bright emissions, others thought they were artifacts caused by the electron beam itself, and were not normally present in the InGaN layers.

To solve the mystery, what was needed was a way of observing the material that did not use such high-energy beams and could not cause the material to decompose into these clusters. Instruments available at Brookhaven “changed the way we could test these promising materials,” Gradečak says. “The CFN’s aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope opened a new and nondestructive window into the LED samples. For the first time, we could get Angstrom-level details — that’s one-tenth of one nanometer — without the risk of the imaging process affecting the sample.”

No clusters found

Postdocs Kamal Baloch of MIT, the lead author of the study, and Aaron Johnston-Peck of CFN actually applied these imaging techniques to the same samples that first launched the controversy over clustering, helping resolve the issue.

“We found that the indium-rich clusters do not actually exist in these samples, even though they remain efficient light-emitters,” Baloch says. That settled the question of whether they were the cause of the bright emissions.

“The important point is that we’ve established a foolproof method for investigating InGaN materials,” Baloch says. “We can use these nondestructive imaging techniques to explore the fundamental relationship between cluster formation and light emission to help unlock the secrets of this amazing alloy.”

By using this imaging technique, “We showed this process did not produce artifacts,” Gradečak says. That means the real cause of the material’s bright light “remains to be understood,” but one dominant theory has now been ruled out.

Sir Colin Humphreys, a professor and director of research in the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in this work, says, “This paper finally solves a longstanding dispute” as to why this type of LEDs are so bright. “This paper definitively shows” that the explanation based on indium clusters was wrong, he says.

“This is an important piece of work which has been carefully and meticulously performed,” he says. “It finally puts an end to this debate, which has raged for the last 10 years.”

InGaN will likely remain a leading material for LEDs, but “even though commercial LEDs are very bright, their efficiency is still below what has theoretically been predicted,” Baloch says. “That’s why there is so much interest in figuring out” exactly what accounts for their superior brightness. “Unless we pin down the mechanism, we will not be able to achieve better efficiency,” Baloch adds.

The research was supported by the MIT Center for Excitonics, which is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Material from a Brookhaven National Laboratory press release was incorporated in this story.

Balance is key to making quantum-dot solar cells work
There has been great interest in recent years in using tiny particles called quantum dots to produce low-cost, easily manufactured, stable photovoltaic cells. But, so far, the creation of such cells has been limited by the fact that in practice, quantum dots are not as good at conducting an electric charge as they are in theory.

Something in the physical structure of these cells seems to trap their electric-charge carriers (known as electrons and holes), but researchers have been hard-pressed to figure out exactly what. Now, for the most widely used type of quantum dots, made of compounds called metal chalcogenides, researchers from MIT may have found the key: The limiting factor seems to be off-kilter ratios of the two basic components that make up the dots.

The new findings — by Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering, materials science and engineering graduate student Donghun Kim, and two other researchers — were reported this month in the journal Physical Review Letters.

In bulk quantities of lead sulfide, the material used for the quantum dots in this study, the ratio (known by chemists as “stoichiometry”) of lead atoms to sulfur atoms is exactly 1-to-1. But in the minuscule quantities of the material used to make quantum dots — which, in this case, were about 5 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, across — this ratio can vary significantly, a factor that had not previously been studied in detail. And, the researchers found, it turns out that this ratio is the key to determining the electrical properties of the material.

When the stoichiometry is a perfect 1-to-1, the quantum dots work best, providing the exact semiconductor behavior that theory predicts. But if the ratio is off in either direction — a bit more lead or a bit more sulfur — the behavior changes dramatically, impeding the solar cell’s ability to conduct charges.

Taking care of dangling bonds

Grossman explains that every atom inside the material has neighboring atoms on all sides, so all of that atom’s potential bonds are used, but some surface atoms don’t have neighbors, so their bonds can react with other atoms in the environment. These missing bonds, sometimes called “dangling bonds,” have been thought to play a critical role in a quantum dot’s electronic properties.

As a result, the consensus in the field has been that the best devices will have what is known as full “passivation”: the addition of extra molecules that bind to any loose atomic bonds on the material’s surface. The idea was that adding more of the passivating material (called ligands) would always improve performance, but that didn’t work as scientists had expected: Sometimes it improved performance, but sometimes it made it worse.

“That was the traditional view that people believed,” says Kim, who was the paper’s lead author. But now it turns out that “how many dangling bonds the quantum dot has is not always important, as it doesn’t really affect the density of trap states — at least in lead-and-sulfur-based dots.” So, if a given dot already has an exact 1-to-1 ratio, adding ligands makes it worse, Kim says.

The new research solves the mystery of why that is: Computer simulations reveal that there is an optimum amount of passivating material, an amount that neutralizes exactly enough of these loose bonds to counterbalance any discrepancy in the stoichiometry, restoring an effective 1-to-1 balance. Too much or too little passivating material, and the imbalance remains, or even increases, reducing the efficiency of the material.

Great potential for solar cells

There has been “a lot of excitement” about the potential for quantum dots in applications including electronic devices, lighting and solar cells, Grossman says. Among other potential advantages, quantum-dot solar cells could be made in a low-temperature process, by depositing material from a solution at room temperature, rather than the high-temperature, energy-intensive processes used for conventional photovoltaics. In addition, such devices could be precisely “tuned,” to obtain maximum conversion of specific wavelengths (colors) of light to energy, by adjusting the size and shape of the particles.

To go beyond the efficiencies achieved so far with quantum-dot solar cells, Grossman says, researchers needed to understand why the charges got trapped in the material. “We found something quite different than what people thought was causing the problem,” he says.

“We hope this will inspire experimenters to look at this in new ways,” he adds.

Figuring out how to apply this knowledge, and how to produce quantum dots with well-controlled elemental ratios, will be “challenging,” Grossman says, “but there are a number of ways of controlling the surface.”

The discovery came as a pleasant surprise, Kim says, noting that the researchers unexpectedly observed the origin of trap states as they were studying the way surface treatments would affect the material. But now that they have found this key factor, he says, they know what their goal is in further research: “The electrons will be happy when the distribution … is just right,” he says.

Giulia Galli, a professor of physics and chemistry at the University of California at Davis who was not connected with this research, says it is “quite a creative and important piece of work,” and adds that, “I'm pretty sure this will stimulate new experiments” to engineer the stoichiometry of quantum dots in order to control their properties.

In addition to Kim and Grossman, the work was carried out by former MIT postdoc Joo-Hyoung Lee, now at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, and Dong-Ho Kim of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) in Cambridge, Mass. The work was supported by SAIT, and is part of a larger quantum-dot solar cell program within the SAIT-MIT alliance that includes professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi.

The strangely familiar browsing habits of 14th-century readers
Today we constantly switch from one text to another: news, blogs, email, workplace documents and more. But a new book by an MIT professor reveals that this is not a new practice: In the 14th century, for instance, many people maintained eclectic reading habits, consuming diverse texts in daily life.

Consider Andrew Horn, the chamberlain for the city of London in the 1320s — meaning he was essentially the lawyer representing London’s interests in court against the king, who was Edward II for most of that time. The bound manuscripts in Horn’s possession, handed down to the city and preserved today, reveal a rich mixture of shorter texts: legal treatises, French-language poetry, descriptions of London and more.

Perusing such diverse texts, within bound volumes, was all in a day’s reading for a well-educated person, asserts Arthur Bahr, a professor of literature at MIT. Now in his book “Fragments and Assemblages,” published by the University of Chicago Press, Bahr says we must reconstruct how medieval people compiled these bound volumes in order to best grasp how they thought and wrote.

“Medieval manuscripts usually survive as fragments, and at the same time they are also very often assemblages of multiple, disparate works,” Bahr says. “The interesting literary-historical question is why specific assemblages got put together the way they did.”

When we realize that individuals read this way, Bahr notes, we can see that the practice of throwing together all kinds of texts in a single bound manuscript may have influenced the composition of the most famous piece of literature of the period, Geoffrey Chaucer’s late-14th-century work “The Canterbury Tales,” a rich collection of linked stories.

“The ability to see the potential of textual juxtapositions is the cultural ground out of which the Canterbury Tales springs in the late 14th century,” Bahr says. “Chaucer’s invitation to readers is a kind of interactive process of composition. He has an idea about what ordering of the tales makes sense, because he creates links between them, but he’s encouraging us to participate. We don’t think of older writing as being that radical, but it is.”

Reading before the printing press

To see why readers 700 years ago jumped between texts so much, recall that this was prior to the invention of the printing press, which was introduced in Europe in the middle of the 15th century. Before single books could be mass-produced more easily, manuscripts were copied out by hand, then bound together. This process led people to have many different types of texts bound together, rather than a single text being the entirety of a bound volume.

In the case of Horn’s manuscripts, Bahr says, London’s chamberlain collected “detailed records of all the rules and legal precedents that give the city power and autonomy. But he included poetry, and bylaws for a poetic society, and a little Latin poem that doesn’t seem to go with anything else. Thinking about the literary, and being able to read in literary ways, as well as practical ways, was a skill he thought was important.”

But Horn was not just throwing a bunch of texts together and expecting readers to bounce around wildly from one to another, Bahr observes. He had a deliberate method to his assemblages of texts.

“Horn actually uses the construction of his books to create literary puzzles for his reader,” Bahr says. “One poem just doesn’t make sense, but if you read the poem in juxtaposition with the legal treatise that comes after, then the two pieces make sense. He’s suggesting that the law and literature are sort of the yin and the yang, you need both. And that is kind of amazing, really.”

In the book, Bahr looks at additional 14th-century manuscripts that compiled works of many authors, but also reinterprets Chaucer through the lens of these reading practices.

“Chaucer is able to conceive of the literary project that he undertakes in large part because those early figures created a literary culture that was attuned to these sorts of textual juxtapositions within literary manuscripts,” Bahr says.

Consider, Bahr adds, the Miller’s Tale, in the prologue of Chaucer’s great work. “It’s a very funny tale about a miller, his adulterous wife, and her lover,” Bahr says. “As Chaucer is getting ready to tell it, he says, [in effect], ‘If you don’t like dirty stories, just turn the page and look at something else.’ This has been taken as a joke, but it’s a serious joke, because we can turn the page, and we’re being invited to think about the effect of different textual juxtapositions. If we put these pieces in a different order, what would that do to the work as a whole?”

Among other things, Bahr points out, it would lead readers to skip about more freely within “The Canterbury Tales” and, in effect, create their own distinctive versions of it.

A polyglot culture

“Fragments and Assemblages” has been well-received by other medievalists. James Simpson, a professor of English at Harvard University, calls it “deeply learned and technically skillful,” while Maura Nolan, a literature professor at the University of California at Berkeley, says that Bahr successfully “stitches together the divided 14th century and demonstrates that literary production during the period was an ongoing and continuous project.”

Among other insights we can glean from reading medieval manuscripts, Bahr notes, is the polyglot culture that existed among learned people in the 14th century. Following the Norman conquest of England in 1066, French was the language of the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, and Latin was the language of the church and most of the state.

“It’s interesting how multilingual these manuscripts can be,” Bahr says. We tend to think of England as having one language, but … if you were a social climber, you needed good French. You have at least a trilingual nation, and then there is Welsh, and other [regional] languages. Because Chaucer wrote in English, it’s easy to lose sight of how, even in the Middle Ages, people were still actively engaged with French and Latin.”

So medieval readers browsed around a lot, read linked stories in creative ways, and lived in a diverse, even globalized intellectual milieu: plus ça change.