21st Century Innovation Systems for Japan and the United States Lessons from a Decade of Change: Report of a Symposium (2009) / Chapter Skim
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Industry-University R&D Partnerships in the United States--Irwin Feller
Industry-University R&D Partnerships in the United States--Irwin Feller
Pages 169-185
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From page 169... ...
as a "knowledge economy" attests to the widespread assessment that a capacity for generating, absorbing, and implementing scientific and technological advances, both basic and applied, is essential to the economic competitiveness of firms, regions, and nations. Almost reflexively, this emphasis on knowledge has led to heightened attention to the role of research universities as sources of new scientific and technological discoveries and of the skilled scientific, engineering, and technical personnel who will populate the new occupations and positions needed to transform ideas and blueprints into processes, products, and services.
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From page 170... ...
, representing research universities, have formed a working partnership toward this end, with their work to be capped by a university-industry summit entitled "Re-engineering the Partnership." This chapter outlines the specific tensions in research agreements and tech nology transfer agreements that have led to the above endeavors. For beneath the aggregate national science indicators that point to viable, indeed robust, relationships in industrial funding of academic R&D and the outpouring of pat ents, licenses, license revenues, and startup firms proudly reported by university representatives, something is obviously not going well.
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From page 171... ...
As is well understood, the connection among these data sets is that the "frontiers of science" quality of academic research, at least in some fields and at some institutions, makes partnering with them of interest to industry. Industry support of academic research in effect represents economically efficient leverag ing of much larger federal government investment in basic research for relatively modest sums.
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From page 172... ...
There are many themes worthy of development from this episode: the economic gains that the United States historically has realized from being a haven for political refugees; the economic gains that it has realized from providing wide low-cost access to higher education; and the emergence of high-tech entrepreneurs as major philanthropic contributors to U.S. universities (Grove 2001)
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From page 173... ...
. Capital campaigns likewise are becoming increasingly important to public research uni versities as they seek to offset the decline in the portion of their general operating budgets that they receive from state governments.
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From page 174... ...
Figure 1 depicts these different levels of relationship as nested circles. What makes all of this both interesting to the analyst and challenging to the practitioner is that the trade-offs relate to uncertain outcomes: the gains, say, from forceful university claims of ownership of intellectual property rights in industrysponsored R&D being traded off for the economic and legal terms of licensing agreements, being traded off in turn for the prospects of future philanthropy from appreciative alumni.
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From page 175... ...
Second, the "fruits of the research will be nonproprietary and freely licensed," reinforcing the earlier statement that patents and licenses are neither the only nor necessarily the best means of trans ferring academic research.3 3Reflecting emerging trends in industry-university R&D partnerships in the information industry, the intellectual property terms of this agreement closely mirror those of the recently announced statement of guiding principles described above (and indeed include several of the same participants)
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From page 176... ...
1. Displeasure is building in the high-tech industrial sector about what are perceived to be overly assertive university claims to ownership of intel lectual property generated under industry-funded research as well as about the "unrealistic" or "excessive" economic terms being sought by universities.
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From page 177... ...
by IRI's External Research Directors Network. The COGR document seeks to dispel what it terms several myths about university technology transfer.
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From page 178... ...
Senior academic administrators, though, tend to see industry's challenge to university claims to ownership of intellectual property from industry-sponsored research grants as reflecting a confounding of industrial and university performance of industrially sponsored research. Contractual R&D 5As noted by Cohen, Walsh and Nelson (2000)
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From page 179... ...
Besides whatever financial pressure or incentive they may have for guaranteed revenue streams to meet annual office expenses, university technol ogy transfer representatives tend to view payment of patent filing costs, upfront fees, and running royalties as a form of earnest money. This earnest money is intended to foster serious efforts by firms to bring a university technology to commercial feasibility and to achieve the university's paramount objective of "getting the technology into the public's hands" via the private sector.
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From page 180... ...
Some federal agencies are seen by university representatives as turning to contracting procedures other than grants and contracts that have the effect of attenuating university claims to intellectual property ownership. In 2004, additional challenges surfaced to Bayh-Dole in the form of proposals to have the National Institutes of Health exercise the federal government's march-in rights in an effort to reduce the price of drugs.
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From page 181... ...
. Finally, increased recognition also is evident within university-sponsored research and technology transfer offices that most industry-sponsored research agreements produce little in the way of intellectual property, so that protracted negotiations insistent on ownership rights gain little in the way of future revenues, while detracting from the research interests of the faculty who are waiting for the funds to conduct the research (and support their graduate students)
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From page 182... ...
feller_02.eps about the harmful effects of academic patenting on the "public goods" character of academic research. Aggressive university policies toward promoting invention disclosures, patenting, and licensing are also seen as threatening the communal characteristics of science; in short, an anti-commons in science is held to be dis placing traditional institutional and individual behaviors that have treated basic research findings as common pool resources.
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From page 183... ...
universities, and thus their enrollments in leading universities in other predominantly English-speaking countries, cannot but further erode the U.S.'s standing in academic research in coming years. Also, in almost symmetrical fashion, pressures on firms to meet short-term profit or stock price targets and on university technology-licensing offices to meet revenue targets can lead either or both parties to push for sponsored research or licensing terms that vitiate the substance of these principles.
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From page 184... ...
2002. "Equity and the Technology Transfer Strategies of American Research Universities." Management Science 48(1)
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From page 185... ...
2001. "Educational Implication of University-Industry Technology Transfer." Journal of Technology Transfer 26:199-205.
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