An ever shrinking Research and Development (R&D) budget, coupled with a widespread perception that the nation is not realizing an adequate return from its substantial investment in the federal laboratory system, has paved the way for an increase in the transfer of technology from the federal laboratories to the private sector. The objective of this research is to determine the indirect cost of performing technology transfer by identifying the resources consumed by several key Office of Research and Technology Applications (ORTA) organizations and the activities performed within these organizations. It was hypothesized that the ORTA organizations, which are considered indirect labor by most costing methods, would expend considerable portions of their resources on activities identified as not being performed by direct labor. This hypothesis was proven true, as all but two of the identified steps consumed a significant portion of the ORTA resources
