University TTOs need to find critical mass to leverage bargaining power, suggests University of California report.
Small universities may benefit by pooling resources to increase their negotiating power, according to a recent research report published by UC Berkeley. The finding emerged as part of a report looking into academic research sponsored by industry.
The underlying findings of the report supported that those academic research projects sponsored by corporate sponsors had a strong track record of leading to innovative patents and licenses, challenging assumptions that corporate support skews science toward inventions that are less accessible and less useful to others than those funded by the government or non-profit organizations.
The findings, published in March in Nature, were based upon a study of two decades of records from the University of California system.
The authors, led by Brian Wright, UC Berkeley professor of agricultural and resource economics, analysed 12,516 inventions and related licenses at nine UC campuses and three associated national laboratories. The inventions were disclosed between 1990 and 2005, and licensing activity was analysed through 2010. Of the inventions, nearly 1,500 were supported at least partly by private industry. (UC Merced, the 10th UC campus, was not included because it opened in 2005.)
The analysis found that industry-funded inventions yielded patents and licenses more frequently than federally sponsored ones, with results consistent across technical fields.
Notably, researchers also found that industry sponsored inventions were more highly cited in subsequent patent applications, known as “forward citations”, the most widely used marker of a patent’s quality and importance, said the report. Each corporate-sponsored invention generated an average of 12.8 forward citations compared with 5.6 for federally sponsored inventions.
“This runs counter to the expectation that corporate-sponsored inventions have narrow applications, and so create … few benefits for others,” the authors wrote.
The intellectual property data analysed by the authors indicate that industry has not been more likely than federally sponsored research to tie up research discoveries in exclusive licenses. Overall, corporate-funded inventions were licensed exclusively 74 percent of the time, while federally funded inventions were licensed exclusively 76 percent of the time. Notably, among the corporate-funded inventions with exclusive licenses, half seemed to go to third parties and not the sponsor.
“We didn’t expect these results,” said Wright. “We thought companies would be interested in applied research that was closer to being products, and thus more likely to be licensed exclusively and less cited than federally funded counterparts, but that did not turn out to be the case.”
To explain why more corporations do not take advantage of exclusive licenses borne from research they sponsor, the authors cite previous studies suggesting that industry turns to universities to explore areas outside of their core business model in the hopes of finding new opportunities for profit, said the University’s newscenter. Some of these inventions might prove more interesting to firms with different agendas or in other industries, the researchers said.
The new analysis also covered only one university system, and it “may not be typical of all academia,” said Wright. He added that the University of California system’s strong reputation for basic research gives its tech transfer offices more pull when drawing up contracts.
During the 20-year period analysed in the paper, UC campuses accounted for up to 9 percent of total U.S. academic research expenditure, and it collectively obtained more issued patents than any other U.S. academic institution. Tech transfer offices at small universities may benefit by pooling resources to increase their negotiating power, said Wright.
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