There were two crucial developments in the success of AMSC’s Bi2223/Ag tape fabrication. The first is the formation of the Wire Working Group at the very early stage of Bi2223 conductor development. The members of the Working Group consisted of scientists of various disciplines from universities, national laboratories, and AMSC. The second was US Department of Energy’s, DOE’s, change of its policy regarding the intellectual properties which were developed under the collaborative research between members of National Laboratories and industry. This is called Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, CREDA. If this agreement is signed by the participating members of DOE’s National Laboratories and of industry for a particular collaboration, the intellectual properties, which are developed from this join-research project, can be shared by both parties. Before the establishment of a policy such as CREDA, the intellectual property right belonged to DOE for any work performed with DOE funding. Thus, industry was reluctant to work with the members of National Laboratories in the areas where possible intellectual properties might arise from the join work. This change in DOE’s policy made possible for the member of national laboratories to join the Wire Working Group by establishing CREDA with AMSC. Once this closely knit group was formed, the members met periodically and assigned each other the pertinent projects which were decided by the group members. Obviously the members from national laboratories and universities worked on a broad range of basic aspects of the problems in order to provide the basic understanding of processing issues and of superconducting properties. On the other hand, ASMC members generally focused on fabrication issues. Although the Group’s size decreased significantly upon emergence of the YBCO coated conductor development, it continued to the present day. The productivity of this group was enormous in attacking jointly a ranges of very complex problems from the phase diagram to the mechanisms for current transport in these tapes. It provided a very good foundation for ASMC’s development of Bi2223/Ag tapes with high critical currents which you see today. Perhaps, one difficulty in this type of the collaboration for the university and the laboratory members is the fact that the publication of the papers based on their collaboration is strictly controlled by the industrial members. Since the performance evaluation of the most of the members from the laboratories and the universities is based on the quality and the number of publications, the suppression or the delay in publishing the papers based on the Group collaboration posed some difficulties. However, it appears that more recently it became less of problems.

　In summary, I believe that this was one of the best examples of very successful collaboration between the university/national laboratory and industry in solving a very difficult problem in the fabrication of technological products.