ACS national meeting programming holds much of interest to industrial and government lab managers and to academic researchers in their role of lab managers running labs and supervising research students. The ACS national meeting will be held August 22-26 in Boston. Slightly over 14,000 people attended. At the ACS Career Fair, 68 employers (of all sizes from large companies to quite small ones) recruited for 484 positions, mostly laboratory positions. ACS members using ACS Career Fair services number 1066. They attending job-hunting workshops, had one-on-one session with ACS career consultants to discuss and improve their résumés, and had mock employment interview session in which they were interviewed by an ACS career consultant. The short interviews were video recorded and the job hunter and career consultant reviewed the video to see how the job hunter could improve his/her interviewing techniques.
Symposium on Open Innovation sponsored by the Division of Business Management and Development
Unfortunately, many joint development alliances fail. Gene Slowinksi of the Rutgers University Graduate School of Management noted, "Managers must deal with the complexities of cooperatively developing intellectual assets, linking decision-making structures and building cross-corporate innovation networks. The difficulties in executing these processes can torpedo the effectiveness of joint development alliances."
Ronald Taylor of Intellectual Assets, Inc., that the intellectual property associated with an open innovation program must be carefully managed. "This requires careful alignment and appropriate negotiations of non-disclosure and joint development agreements, with timing that maintains intellectual property rights," he observed. "Moving too soon can expose the firm to contamination, but waiting too long can result in a loss of the fruits of the collaboration."
In addition to developing new products and processes, managers need to experiment with new business models without disrupting current operations, notes Saul Kaplan of the Business Innovation Factory. "Most organization leaders today have only had to lead a single business model throughout his or her entire career. And most haven't had to significantly change a business model in order to sustain the organization competitively. Organization leaders of tomorrow will have to change their business model several times over the course of a career and the successful leader will establish an ongoing process to explore new business models, even models that might threaten the current one."
ACS Division of Small Chemical Businesses
This division presented a symposium on how small companies can obtain funds from the federal government's Small Business Innovation Research program. Companies have obtained up to $5 million in funding. This programs supply finding that does not dilute an entrepreneur's ownership share.
Adjunct faculty often excluded from research
The Women Chemists Committee sponsored a symposium on the status of adjunct faculty members and the challenges associated with being one. A growing fraction of university faculty members are being substantially excluded from doing original research, supervising research students and managing laboratories.
Many of the growing corps of non-tenure track faculty are being excluded from these activities as well as the benefits of tenure. For example, Cheryl Lavoie of Simmons College noted that as a non-tenure-track chemistry faculty member, her duties include lecturing, tutoring, outreach, as well as correcting lab reports and supervising lab instructors. There was no mention of research.
Adjunct professors are often part-timers and work at two or even more institutions to earn an adequate income.
and much more
The Division of Chemistry and the Law presented a symposium of interest to lab managers as well as patent attorneys on what managers, business owners and professors need to know to begin safeguarding their inventions. Of particular interest was paper CLAW 32 providing advice to help guide inventors and lab managers to help them answer the question "Am I ready to patent this development."
Of course, there were also literally thousands of papers on various areas of chemical science and technology. One can keyword search the meeting abstracts, which are posted on the ACS website at http://abstracts.acs.org/chem/240nm/program/divisionindex.php
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