Some authorities on technolgoy transfer feel that industry is not fully capitalizing on the inventive output of universities and nonprofit organizations. From the point of view of the government, the stakes are high. The magnitude of federal support of research and development in these organizations demands evidence of useful results if it is to be continued. The University Subcommittee on Patent Policy, an interagency group ultimately responsible to the Federal Council for Science and Technology, reviewed the difficulty of the university in technology transfer, and identified some reasons for the universities not achieving optimum results: (1) universities do not generally have adequate management capability to transfer research results to the industrial concerns that might make use of them; (2) the "not-invented-here" syndrome, in which industrial concerns prefer to use their own ideas rather than the ideas of others; (3) uncertainty over ownership of inventions collaboratively developed or generated; and (4) contamination, or potential compromise of rights in proprietary research that parallels university research, resulting from exposure of the private organization to ideas, compositions, and/or test results arising from government-sponsored research. It may be necessary for the government to persuade universities to provide technology management capabilities by guaranteeing patent rights in exchange for the development of such capabilities, thus eliminating some of the problems just enumerated. (MSE)