Technology Transfer: The Importance of Networks and Capacity Building in Technology Transfer and Commercialization (cont.)

The process of recognizing the potential marketability of ideas and readying them for practical use is a huge task. Rarely can a university muster the resources to support the work of proactively identifying, evaluating, and developing all of its promising discoveries.

Bayh-Dole, through passing responsibility for ownership to universities, has had powerful effects. In return for identifying and patenting promising innovations made with federal funds, universities receive exclusive licenses and the income that goes along with them. The intent, or course, was to drive more innovations into the marketplace by delegating responsibility and providing broad-based incentives for success. And to a certain degree, it has worked. On one hand, innovation flow via patenting and licensing has increased dramatically, along with increases in federal research dollars.

While universities have been given the opportunity and obligation for commercialization, we are not seeing the full potential of this federally funded research. Instead, a much clearer result has been the ramp-up of university technology transfer offices with the expectation that the office, in and of itself, is a sufficient resource to meet the government’s mandate to commercialize. The assumption being, “If we build it, they will commercialize.”

We know that only a small number of universities receive the lion’s share of licensing income. And a recent survey of engineering and science professors at eleven major universities found that only 30 percent of research faculty account for the great bulk of patenting and licensing.

There are elite universities that rank in the nation’s top ten for research funding, but far lower in patenting and licensing. There are many small- to medium-sized universities that have well-regarded research faculty who, themselves, receive significant funding, but very few or no commercial activities result.

Admittedly, technology transfer as defined today is a complex business, for which many universities are poorly trained and equipped. The process of recognizing the potential marketability of ideas and readying them for practical use is a huge task. Rarely can a university muster the resources to support the work of proactively identifying, evaluating, and developing all of its promising discoveries. Yet in the present system, that is exactly what each of 280 or so institutions is expected to do.

Add to that the pressures universities often face to be economic development engines for their regions – profit centers whose primary goal is jump-starting new local companies and the job creation that goes with it – and the result can be just the opposite: a constricting of innovation flow. Also, faculty members who believe basic research is being threatened by the pressures of commercialism may be less inclined to come forward with promising ideas. And on both sides, there is a tendency to overly narrow the focus, which perpetuates the cycle of missed opportunities. Universities often concentrate their tech transfer resources on just a few innovations having the greatest potential payback. Similarly, VCs tend to focus on a few proven university relationships rather than casting a wider net that would likely uncover new and even more profitable discoveries.

All told, it’s an environment that was, in theory, created to empower innovation flow to the market, but instead is under-supported, commercial-unfriendly, and in fact sets up universities, industry, and the capital community to be extremely limited in their success.

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