Posts Tagged: "the National Science Foundation"

Universities: Fallen Angels or Stewards of Bayh-Dole?

University discoveries are recognized as critical national assets because Bayh-Dole gave academic institutions the ability to own and manage inventions made with federal funding. The law helped lift the economy out of the doldrums of the 1970’s, re-establishing America’s leadership in every field of technology…. While the critics argue that Cohen-Boyer would have had the same impact without patent protection, there are other more likely scenarios. It could have languished on the shelf as did many other published, but not patented, discoveries. It took a lot of work from Reimers before U.S. companies recognized its potential. That effort would not have been made to promote a scientific paper.

Academic Patent Licensing Helps Drive the U.S. Economy

What’s even more impressive is the impacts on gross industry output and GDP are up 14% while  the number of U.S. jobs supported rose 12% since the previous report issued two years ago. That’s remarkable at a time when the overall U.S. economy has been treading water… While the attacks on Bayh-Dole (and the patent system) are largely driven by emotion, here’s some additional data BIO cited that’s worth considering: over the past 25 years academic inventions led to the formation of 11,000 startups and the commercialization of more than 10,000 new products.