A Study on Commercialization of R&D Projects in Port and Logistics Industry: Case of Non-Stop Automated Gate System

The international business environment of port and logistics industry has been changed drastically in the last few decades. The increase of cargo volume due to globalization, advent of ultra-large container vessels, and improvements in cargo handling technologies created new requirements and resulted in fierce competition among the ports to become the hub port of their region. For this purpose, the ports are heavily investing in their infrastructure and operating systems to remain competitive. Meanwhile a vast amount of research and development (R&D) projects and academic research are being carried on, most of which are government sponsored. On the other hand, there is a serious gap between the technology development efforts and actual commercialization of the developed systems. The real return on R&D cannot be fully realized if the systems are not commercialized. Hence this study proposes a model of commercialization of R&D outcomes which are developed in academic institutions under government sponsorship, by surveying related literature. The derived model is applied to the case of Non-stop Automated Gate System (NAGS), which is a typical government sponsored R&D project in the port and logistics field, and the direction of commercialization was proposed. Finally the applicability of the model to other similar projects was discussed.

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