Technology Transfer Systems in the United States and Germany Lessons and Perspectives (1997) / Chapter Skim
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Technology Transfer from Higher Education to Industry
Technology Transfer from Higher Education to Industry
Pages 91-123
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From page 91... ...
industry within the three major sectors of the nation's nonindustrial R&D enterprise: research universities and colleges, federal government laboratories, and the diverse population of privately held, nonacademic, mostly nonprofit organizations (e.g., independent and affiliated R&D institutes, consortia, incubators and research parks, and technical and professional associations)
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From page 92... ...
In 1993, U.S. academic researchers authored nearly 100,000 articles in professional journals, representing 25 percent of the world's scientific and technical literature.33 DIVERSITY A second distinguishing feature of U.S.
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academic research in science and engineering is sponsored directly via grants or contracts from federal mission agencies. In other words, it is not supported by public "general university" or "base institutional" funds as is the case in Germany, Japan, and other advanced industrialized countries.
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U.S. academic R&D, state and local governments 7.4 percent, industry 6.9 percent, individuals and nonprofit institutions 7.4 percent, with the remaining 18.1 percent coming directly from academic institutions themselves.34 Most federal funds for academic research are awarded on a competitive basis to individual investigators or to research teams.
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funding of academic research has not kept pace with the financial demands of a growing population of academic researchers, U.S. academic research expenditures grew faster than those of any other major
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During this period, academic research grew at an average annual rate of 5.8 percent, compared with 2.8 percent for FFRDCs and other nonprofit laboratories, 1.4 percent for industrial laboratories, and 0.7 percent for all federal laboratories (National Science Board, 1996)
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Accordingly, academic research assumed a central role in the new federal science policy articulated during the mid-1940s -- a policy based on a new "social contract" that explicitly harnessed the academic science community in service of national objectives through greatly increased federal support for academic research and its associated infrastructure (Bush, 1945)
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From page 98... ...
This new funding environment fostered a more pronounced division of labor between universities and industry with regard to basic and applied research, and reinforced differences between the two sectors' research cultures.37 Academia rewarded research faculty primarily for the originality of their research; the quality, number, and timeliness of their research publications; and their success in competing for research funding from government agencies and nonprofit foundations. Accordingly, the academic research community placed a premium on the openness, free exchange, and rapid dissemination of new knowledge and ideas.
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From page 99... ...
.39 Recent federal industrial technology initiatives such as the Advanced Technology Program of the National Institute of Standards and Technology or the multiagency Technology Reinvestment Project have also included provisions supportive of university-industry collaborative research.40 State governments, too, have tried to promote closer ties between public universities and their host region's economies and industrial base. The 1980s witnessed a shift to increasingly science-and-technology-driven economic development strategies among most of the 50 states.
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industry. It also acknowledges the important role academic research publications play in the transfer of highly specialized knowledge in a number of industries.
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From page 101... ...
These mechanisms include faculty consulting; the movement of graduates and faculty from academia to industry; university investments in the transfer and commercialization of technology; industry-sponsored or collaborative academicindustrial R&D; and a range of other market-making activities by industry and academia directed at the commercially valuable outputs of academic research. TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER MECHANISMS There are three types of mechanisms for technology transfer from academia to industry in the United States.42 The first includes such things as faculty consulting and the transfer of university intellectual property and proto-technology embodied in graduates and faculty who are hired by private companies.
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university faculty are salaried for only 9 months out of the year and rely heavily on external sources of funding for their research also provides a strong incentive for them to engage in consultant work. Movement of University-Based Researchers to Industry The movement of academic researchers -- graduates, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty -- to private industry is an important transfer mechanism for technology, proto-technology, and highly specialized knowledge and skills.
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Gross annual royalty receipts for the 127 universities were roughly $274 million in 1995, over ten times those of federal laboratories but only onehundredth those of industry.46 Many universities have established in-house offices of technology transfer or technology licensing, whose primary activities focus on locating, patenting, and licensing university-developed intellectual property and less frequently on spinning off inventions to start-up companies. Other universities have established semiautonomous technology transfer organizations to pursue some or all of the university's patenting, licensing, and technology transfer functions.
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From page 104... ...
They ties are still searching for effective ways to manage and grow their R&D and technology transfer activities with industry. As of the late 1980s, drug and medical device patents accounted for about 35 percent of all university patents among five broad classes of technologies defined by Henderson et al.
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In fiscal 1995, only six institutions received more that $10 million in gross royalties -- the University
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106 TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER SYSTEMS IN THE UNITED STATES AND GERMANY BOX 3 Computer-Aided Design for Microelectronics Well into the 1970s, designers created the complex geometric pat terns needed to manufacture microelectronic chips using manual or com puter-based drafting tools. As chip complexity increased, it became nearly impossible to complete error-free designs in one attempt.
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A parallel industry initiative, the Computer Aided Design/Computer Aided Manufacturing Consortium, provided $18 million in cash and computers to construct and equip a large new research facility on the UC Berkeley campus. Direct design synthesis of chips from formal specifications became an additional goal.
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From page 108... ...
Universities with "home-run" inventions often have order-of-magnitude higher royalty income streams than universities that lack such blockbusters. For example, as of 1993, WARF received $99 million in license royalties for vitamin D and related technologies; the University of California system and Stanford shared $97 million in royalties on the Cohen-Boyer gene splicing technique;48 Michigan State earned $86 million in royalties on cisplatin; the University of Florida brought in $33 million in royalties related to Gatorade; and Iowa State received $27 million in licensing fees for fax technology.
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And last, but by no means least, by acquiring equity stakes in local start-up companies, universities are able to make a highly visible commitment to the local or regional economy, thereby generating good will with current or potential future patrons within state administrations or legislatures. There are two main avenues by which universities invest in start-up companies: through portfolio investment of the university's endowment and through
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MIT, for example, is said to invest roughly 10 percent of its endowment in venture capital projects. The second route, the establishment of administratively separate or independent organizations, provides a mechanism that (a)
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. In addition to contracts or grants with individual academic researchers or research teams, industry sponsorship of university research can involve the establishment of formal university-industry research centers; research consortia involving other universities/departments, multiple firms, government laboratories, and other nonprofit research organizations; and "support-for-research-access" initiatives such as industrial liaison or affiliate programs.
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Throughout the remainder of the average number of companies participating in each center was 17.6; the median number was 6. UIRCs vary significantly in size, whether measured in terms of overall research budget or the number of academic researchers or industrial partners involved.
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. Forty percent of the research conducted by UIRCs is basic research, 40 percent is applied research, and 20 percent is development work.
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Most industrial support of UIRCs appears to be directed at more basic and long-term applied research. In addition to direct funding, industry contributions to individual centers also include equipment, instrumentation, and internship opportunities for students.
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NSF provided seed money for these centers with the expectation that the host institutions would raise matching funds from industry, state and local governments, and internally. While the objectives of these centers' programs vary in many respects (research focus, relative emphasis on research, education, and technology transfer, etc.)
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academic research enterprise -- in particular, its capacity for basic research and its relative openness -- that is unacceptable (Dasgupta and David, 1994; Rosenberg and Nelson, 1994) In fact, recent empirical studies indicate that university faculty receiving support from industry tend to conduct research that is more applied on average and to accept restrictions on the dissemination of their research findings (Blumenthal et al., 1986a,b; Cohen et al., 1994; Morgan et al., 1994a,b)
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TABLE 2.14 Distribution of UIRCs by Importance of Selected Goals Number and Percentage [in brackets] of UIRCs Scoring Goals as: Not Somewhat Very Mean Important Important Important Important Scorea To advance technological or 5 20 88 384 3.71 scientific knowledge (N=497)
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From page 118... ...
. Most ILPs, however, are focused on a narrowly defined research area involving individual academic departments or research clusters, or, in some cases, individual UIRCs.53 These more typical ILPs involve closer interaction between academic researchers and technical staff from industry and a higher level of faculty engagement overall in their management.
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Moreover, research consortia, like UIRCs, may also encompass targeted industrial liaison programs. Technical Assistance Programs Technical assistance programs are designed to serve small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)
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The Biotechnology Process Engineering Center Consortium offers in dustry the opportunity to exchange information and personnel, share equipment and facilities, and perform collaborative research with the BPEC or with other consortium members. Consortium members keep in contact with BPEC faculty and students and receive advance notice of new technologies developed in the center's laboratories.
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From page 121... ...
research colleges and universities and their research faculties have had great latitude to experiment with new institutional arrangements to this end. Responding to the economic development challenge, academic research institutions have expanded their portfolio of technology transfer activities to encompass collaborative research centers, consortia, proactive technology licensing offices, venture capital funds, and technical extension programs.
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Through more intense research collaboration, firms in a number of industries have gained enhanced access to academic researchers -- faculty, postdocs, and graduate students -- with highly specialized knowledge. With respect to the impact of academic research and technology transfer on industrial performance there are clearly significant inter-industry variations in experience.
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For companies, there are a host of operational questions as to what can and cannot be accomplished working with universities and which practices work best. For universities, there is an equally complex set of operational questions -- about how best to serve companies as clients -- made even more difficult by the educational mission of universities and a long-standing historical remove of many universities from commercial concerns.
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