Universities will find themselves in the spotlight—and perhaps in the cross hairs—at an unusual government summit here on Wednesday focused on how they can better turn their research into new products and new companies.
The U.S. Department of Commerce is holding the summit and has invited 45 participants, including university presidents, corporate leaders, university technology-transfer officials, and a few outspoken critics of those technology-transfer offices.
Attendees at the half-day forum on “Catalyzing University Research for a Stronger Economy” will focus on four issues: finding the capital to move early-stage inventions from the lab to the marketplace (a challenge commonly referred to as bridging the “valley of death”); universities and regional economic development; educating the next generation of entrepreneurs; and university strategies for technology commercialization.
The event, part of President Obama’s broader push to revive the economy, comes as some critics of university technology transfer are asking the Department of Commerce to change rules of the Bayh-Dole Act to give academic researchers greater say over how their university inventions are commercialized. That effort has been led by two leaders of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, who have characterized universities as holding professors’ inventions “hostage.”
The change is also been championed by a former professor at the University of Georgia, Renee Kaswan, who contends that the university mishandled an invention of hers (which is the basis for Restasis eye drops) and has taken up the cause for professors’ rights in a new Web site she founded.
Rebuttal From AUTM
The Kauffman Foundation officials made their pitch for a “free agency solution” to get around “underperforming” technology-transfer offices last fall.
In response, the president of the Association of University Technology Managers, Arundeep S. Pradhan, has submitted a strongly worded rebuttal to the Department of Commerce, calling the Kauffman proposal “uninformed and unsupported.” The rebuttal, a copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, contends that a free-agency model would be “impractical and unworkable” and could result in pitting scientists who collaborate on an invention against each other and potentially increasing conflicts of interest.
On Friday, Mr. Pradhan, who helps oversee technology transfer at Oregon Health and Science University, published a less-strident version of the rebuttal at the Web site of Business Week, and on Monday, he explained his association’s apparent silence on the issue until now, in a blog post on its Web site.
Mr. Pradhan and one of the Kauffman officials are among those expected to attend, along with the presidents or chancellors of the Universities of Akron, Arkansas at Little Rock, California at Davis, Kentucky, and Nebraska. The presidents of Morgan State and Stanford Universities, and the California Institute of Technology are also expected, along with executives from General Electric and General Motors, a founder of the well-regarded Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the former executive director of that center, Krisztina Holly, who now works at the University of Southern California and has been pressing for greater federal support of creative technology-transfer models.
