Management of technology transfer in an advanced project — The case of Surveyor

This paper uses a specific advanced project — the Surveyor — as a basis for presenting a number of problems in technology transfer and the methods used to solve the problems. The paper emphasizes the importance of mission orientation to transfer and outlines the several organizational approaches that were tried before assigning full-time project groups within the discipline departments. Several examples of planning problems are followed by a description of the organizational methods developed to deal with them. These include “working residencies,” independent evaluation of prototypes and analysis by the user in parallel with the provider, design reviews, failure-mode analysis, and problem-failure reporting.