Follow the Money

Jason Pontin's editorial "The Crisis in Tech Finance" (March 2005) brings out an important point about the so-called transfer gap between lab R&D and commercial financing. Your suggestion on ­using demand pull -- with government creating demand for technologies before the market does so -- is very useful. Unfortunately, it would be difficult to persuade those on the demand side to make such commitments without knowing that the technology offers a good solution to the problem at hand -- and if it does, private financiers would probably be more than willing to back the technology anyway. The solution here could well be on the supply side: how far can the researchers push the technology with incremental innovation to make it visibly useful to the financiers?

Aditya Watal
New York, NY