Forget research universities. Forget national labs: This technology broker combs the scientific halls of the Soviet Union—the entire Eastern bloc—looking for new technologies that could be of value to U.S. companies. Kiser Research, started in 1980 by businessman John Kiser Ill and engineer Barney O’Meara, is currently working to find homes in the U.S. for advanced materials developed in the USSR and its neighboring nations.
The company traces its beginnings back to two reports Kiser wrote for the State Department on technologies that had been transferred from the Soviet Union to the U.S. Although the USSR and its neighbors had created several significant inventions—soft contact lenses, for instance, come from Czechoslovakia and the metal staples used in surgery from the Soviet Union—no one had systematically examined these exports before Kiser.
Kiser Research has helped bring the West’s attention to a wide variety of discoveries in fields ranging from pharmaceuticals to ...
