| Abstract: | In 1990, Congress authorized the creation of a pilot Technology Access Program (TAP), to be administered jointly by the Small Business Administration and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. TAP, modelled substantially on a Minnesota state program, will subsidize access by small businesses to [1] a network of several thousand peer-recommended technical experts across the country and [2] interactive searching of technical and business literature databases. Preliminary evidence, from two surveys of random samples of companies that subscribe to the Minnesota service, indicate that this form of technology transfer is effective and could have a substantial positive impact on the productivity of small companies. If the pilot TAP program is successful, it could serve as the basis for a national technical-extension service. |
