Vijay Verma’s scientific contributions

Summary form only given. Project management literature has demonstrated an evolving awareness of the emerging roles of “leadership” and “project management”. At the same time, although there are acknowledged parallels and complementarities between leadership and management, it has been recognized that they represent sufficiently different demands within any individual project that they should be treated as distinct areas of knowledge and skill. With a suitably skilled visionary leader, who possesses the essential resources to manage the technical team, technological innovations should emerge and be able to progress to an initial prototype within any dedicated research laboratories. Without the presence of these essential leadership and management skills, it is destined to languish and wither within the walls of academic research. Leadership requires a vision of future possibilities combined with the ability to motivate a team to willingly follow and strive to achieve the objectives of the leader. Management, on the other hand, involves the efficient allocation of available resource so that individual tasks, and ultimately the whole project, can be completed. Accepted project management theory differentiates between leadership and management

R&D today is a large industry that consumes vast amounts of public and private funds in most countries. It is be-coming increasingly evident that technology transfer and the commercialization of research done at universities and government funded research laboratories must be a key el-ement of their comprehensive strategic plan. It involves us-ing a verified and organized knowledge and research to de-velop commercially viable products. It requires a visionary leader with effective project management skills to manage and motivate a team of scientists and engineers, otherwise even a top rated research will evervate and wither within the walls of research laboratories. This paper will highlight the importance, challenges and techniques of commercial-izing technology from accelerator research laboratories. It will provide an overview of the requirements of scientific leadership for both commercialization of research and tech-nology, together with some case studies based on the ex-perience at TRIUMF – Canada's national sub-atomic re-search facility in Vancouver. TRIUMF's experience with both research and commemrcial developments involving innovative technologies, along with some of the important leadership and management factors that lead to successful projects will be described.