Since its passage, the Bayh-Dole Act has bolstered US economic output by up to $1.7 trillion, supported 5.9 million jobs and helped lead to more than 14,000 spinouts.
The death of Bob Dole, a Republican senator and US presidential candidate, aged 98 has seen university tech transfer experts reflect on the importance of one of his signature pieces of legislation, the Bayh Dole Act.
Tom Hockaday, former head of technology transfer activities at the University of Oxford for ten years from 2006 to 2016 and author of “University Technology Transfer – What It Is and How to Do It” published last year, said Dole was “one of the grandparents of global university technology transfer. The Bayh Dole Act of 1980, effective 1981, started so much of what we see today.”
Reb Thomas, publisher of KnowledgeEconomy.com and attorney at Thomas Law Firm, added: “I am upset that US news media are not properly featuring this aspect of Dole’s career. I don’t believe it is an overstatement to say that Bayh Dole has created trillions of dollars of economic activity and dramatically fuelled the acceleration of the #InnovationEconomy in the US and (by example) many other countries.”
Since its passage, the Bayh-Dole Act has bolstered US economic output by up to $1.7 trillion, supported 5.9 million jobs, and helped lead to more than 14,000 startup companies, according to a consortium of US-based research and scientific organisations, Bayh-Dole 40.
The Economist had called it: “Possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century was the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980… More than anything, this single policy measure helped to reverse America’s precipitous slide into industrial irrelevance.”
Globally, there are 16 million patents that count, according to the Economist’s analysis. Last year, 1.6 million were granted.
It cited PatentVector’s figures that the US has the most active patents of any country, at 3.3 million worth $2.9 trillion, followed by China with 3.1 million valued at $392bn.
Picture source: Bob Dole, Wikicommons
