Posts Tagged: "technology transfer offices"

It’s Not Paranoia – They Really Are After You

First of all, congratulations! You made The Washington Post and they even spelled your name correctly. Unfortunately, AUTM was specifically called out in an article titled Patent Trolls Have a Surprising Ally: Universities… For a profession that keeps a low profile and goes out of its way not to antagonize people, you may wonder what in the world’s going on that you are gaining such notoriety. The answer is that you are in the sights of several groups who do not wish you well. Some want to weaken the patent system for their short term benefit, some believe society would be better off if inventions were freely available without patents; some don’t think it’s moral for universities to work with industry, and others believe they should determine who reaps the rewards of innovation. While operating on diverse belief systems, they all have one thing in common: they don’t like you.

Spread the Word About Tech Transfer – It Works!

At IPWatchdog.com we write about Bayh-Dole, technology transfer and University innovation regularly. In 2014 we are going to more regularly write about University innovations in the hope of getting good information out to the public to demonstrate the important role of Bayh- Dole and the innovations coming from Universities. Help us help you! Below is a list of the information that would be extremely helpful to have, much of which we could not obtain publicly. Critical to a good, interesting story is conveying the back story, which may be about why the inventor pursued this path in the first place or perhaps about real people who have benefit from the innovation. I understand that some of the following piece of information may be deemed to be confidential, but the more you provide the more substantive and interesting any article can be, which will lead to greater “good publicity,” which patent owners sorely need in this political climate.

Does University Patent Licensing Pay Off?

Patent licensing or creating new companies is not a get rich quick path for schools despite the occasional blockbuster invention or Google spin-out. Indeed, enriching universities is not the goal of the Bayh-Dole Act which spurred the rapid growth of TTO’s. Still, every state now sees its research universities as key parts of their economic development strategy shows that it’s not just the traditionally dominant R&D universities that are making significant contributions under Bayh-Dole… AUTM estimates the impact from sales of products based on licensed academic research in 2012 totaled $80 billion dollars – that’s double the entire federal investment in university research. Another study found that university patent licensing supported 3 million jobs between 1996-2010 (that’s an average of 200,000 jobs per year).