Commercial interactions with federal laboratories: Perspectives from industry on the costs and benefits

Several public policy initiatives have sought to enhance the value of federal laboratories as commercial partners with US industry. However, few evaluations of the commercial interactions between federal laboratories and private firms include the perspective of the industrial partners. Rarer still, is an assessment by companies of the costs and benefits they experienced. In this regard, such assessments, including industry estimates of the monetary value of the interactions and the technical outputs used, were examined. The findings indicate that, on average, companies view these interactions as quite positive with considerable net benefits going to the firms. But there is considerable variance for most of the benefit-cost indicators.