A U.S. Commerce Department forum here on Wednesday about how to better use academic research to create new jobs and new products gave universities high marks for the quality of their research but a “Needs Improvement” for getting those findings into the marketplace.
Forum participants, who included more than 50 leaders from academe, industry, and government, said some ways to improve the process might involve establishing more regional innovation centers to help universities develop their inventions, and setting aside a portion of federal research grants to explicitly support commercialization of early-stage ideas.
It’s not enough to just pay for research and “say a prayer that something good will happen down the road,” said Patrick Gallagher, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
With so many unemployed workers and competitor nations chasing the same high-growth industries as the United States is, the commercialization of academic inventions “must be as efficient and creative as we can make it,” he said. Mr. Gallagher was one of several Obama-administration officials who took park in the half-day, closed-door event, called Catalyzing University Research for Stronger Economy, and later joined with a few university leaders to brief reporters about it.
He and the university participants also took pains to explain that the forum’s focus was not to push for more applied research aimed at short-term fixes, but, rather, the kind of research that could create new industries.
They also noted that others beside universities bear responsibility for filling the voids in the “innovation ecosystem” that now make it hard to get academic inventions to the point where businesses or venture-capital firms will invest in them.
‘Harvesters’ of New Invention Ideas
Industry needs to step up too, they said. In some cases, said Luis M. Proenza, president of the University of Akron, that might mean confronting concerns over conflicts of interest involving partnerships between industry and universities. “Frankly there needs to be times when the synergies need to be understood and celebrated,” he said.
Participants said they also saw no need to change the rules or practices of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which encourages universities to commercialize research developed with federal funds by giving them the right to own the profits from deals they might make. The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation has recently argued that the law gives too much authority to technology-transfer offices, which the foundation says are often inefficient. Mr. Proenza and others said the law was flexible enough to allow for other commercialization paths, like those the Kauffman foundation has been promoting.
But even as they defended universities’ record in commercialization, the university leaders acknowledged that it could be improved.
“We’re probably not maximizing the output,” said Lee T. Todd Jr, president of the University of Kentucky. (He noted that Kentucky is now using a grant to pay two employees to work as “harvesters” of new invention ideas by scouring university labs for ideas that might have commercial potential.)
Mr. Todd and others said it was also important to develop new ways of measuring the effectiveness of commercialization, to include factors like how many new jobs are created and how much investment do the ideas draw. “They’re trackable,” he said. Organizations like the Association of University Technology Managers track gauges like patents awarded and licenses issued, but don’t go so far as to try to assess job creation. A number of other organizations have recently begun to look at those broader approaches.
James B. Milliken, president of the University of Nebraska system, said universities could also do a better job of helping the economies of their regions if they would collaborate more with one another and with the private sector.
