HBCU Technology Transfer Supply Chain Networks’ Sustainability: Budget Resource Planning Tool Development

Abstract

"This study describes the development of a university technology transfer supply chain network sustainability tool that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) can use to become more self-reliant financially. HBCUs lag behind their peer non-HBCUs because historically they have been under-served and were originally established largely as teaching and blue collar trade schools. Increased involvement in research oriented activities such as technology transfer will likely enable HBCUs to grow into new or stronger research institutions. The literature review revealed several problem areas with non-HBCUs university technology transfer include a resource planning issues. These problem areas for non-HBCUs would be challenging for HBCUs as well. Problems with university technology transfer have led to unethical behavior among faculty inventors and university technology transfer specialists at non-HBCUs (C. Hamilton, Schumann, D., 2016). Despite these problems, the non-HBCUs are generating licensing revenues. Systems dynamics is the process of combining the theory, method and philosophy necessary to analyze the behavior of a system in order to provide a common foundation that can be applied whenever it is desired to understand and influence how things change over time. Applying the systems dynamics approach, a budget resource planning tool was developed using a linear programming optimization technique. This study illustrates that classic industrial uses of linear programming optimization techniques can uniquely be used to optimize budget resource planning for sustainable HBCU supply chain networks and other emerging research institutions."