Publish or perish is the mantra of leading Research Universities. Professors receive tenure based on their publication track record. Universities profile themselves based on the publication record of their staff. As a result, U.S. academic institutions account for roughly three-quarters of all U.S. papering each year1. University Papering trends frequently form the basis for rating academic standings of Research Universities. However, universities can and should become the fly wheel for economic development. Some universities such as MIT or University of Texas in Austin become the seed for Centers of Innovations. Particularly in today’s knowledge economy, Research Universities need to take a role in commercializing their scientific and technological innovation. For Universities to fulfill this role, they will need to emphasize patenting as well as papering.
While Professors have been patenting their innovations for over a century, it has only been in the past few decades that universities have begun to view such intellectual property as valuable sources of revenue. In 1980, the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act allowed universities to retain the rights to patents that resulted from federally-funded research, with the stated purpose to encourage the wider dissemination of innovation for the public’s benefit. The idea was that the government funding of research can stimulate economic development. The Bayh-Dole Act gave universities not just permission, but also incentive to actively pursue the licensing of their technological innovations. Patents bring direct revenue to universities through licensing, but they also foster broader research partnerships that can lead to ongoing technological development around break through innovations. Patent Analytics is one method that universities and their licensing partners can use to evaluate the relative strengths of university patent portfolios.
We have discussed geographical Centers of Innovation (CoI) previously in our series of articles on Patent Analytics. Centers of Innovation foster economic development by linking scientific and technology innovation with commercial success though the creation of new businesses or new divisions within larger corporations. The CoI becomes a magnet for like-minded technologists, entrepreneurs, and others who together create ventures. While not all ventures survive, the CoI is continually churning new ideas into ventures --- and some survive. Each year The Patent Board ranks the top 10 regional Centers of Innovation – or Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSA) – by tracking the patenting activity within the MSA by technology grouping. Most of the larger CoIs include one or more affiliated universities . Ranked #1 by The Patent Board for the past two years, Silicon Valley (San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose, CA) is a well-known example of such a Center of Innovation. With such prestigious universities as Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon (West Coast campus), San José State University and Santa Clara University bringing together the best minds in various fields of research, the Silicon Valley area has provided a prominent example of how the confluence of great ideas in one geographic location can lead to the explosion of start-up companies and the rapid development of an entire industry. In 1984, two married IT professionals at Stanford University, attempting to communicate by computer at opposite ends of the campus, ended up developing the first router with the help of several co-workers. When the non-profit Stanford could not capitalize on the invention, the two IT professionals founded Cisco to make routers available to a larger audience. Today Cisco has more than 60,000 employees and $39 billion in revenue and remains headquartered in San Jose, California, providing a vital contribution to the local economy. In 1996, research by two graduate students at Stanford led to a great idea about how to analyze relationships between websites by looking at backlinks – this great idea became the basis of Google’s search engine rankings after the two students founded Google in 1998. With almost 20,000 employees and $22 billion in revenue, Google continues to contribute to the economic growth of the Silicon Valley area. For the complete article please visit www.iptoday.com
