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Iowa’s House of Representatives recently passed HF829 as a means to grow Iowa’s tech industry. It calls for four things:

1. Boost high-tech training dollars for employers;
2. Promote small and large company collaboration;
3. Fund prototype and concept development with pre-seed capital; and
4. Connect students with IT companies through Internship Programs.

It is great seeing legislative support for IT growth, even though it is a very bureaucratic approach. That aside I am somewhat opposed to #2, especially after reading the *fine print*:

“The State has introduced a new program to provide financial and technical assistance to encourage joint-venture development of “orphan” IT innovations. Orphan IT innovations are those technologies which have commercial potential but the generators of the technology do not wish to further commercialize the innovation themselves.”

My question: if the parties responsible for developing the technology have not taken the opportunity to monetize it should that not throw up a very large red flag?

The example I have been given is that Wells Fargo has applications they’ve built sitting on their shelves (more realistically - on their servers) that have been deprecated but still have value. The idea is that smaller software firms can *acquire* this software in a joint collaboration effort with Wells Fargo to commercialize it. I’m sure there are other examples (please let me know in the comments). I’m just speaking on behalf of the small software firms but I’ll say “no thanks”.

Oh, and if anyone out there wants to take a week and do the paperwork for #3 for us that would be great!

Tags: Iowa, IDED, Technology

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