Science and Technology (S&T), like Research and Development (R&D), has become a case of capital investment like any other economic sector. This has distanced R&D from social needs, to the extent that part of R&D ends up actually being fictitious, in the sense that it acquires a price on the market but never becomes part of material…

This brief describes the technology transfer (TT) and knowledge translation (KT) work of Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden and the Trace Research & Development Center. The Trace Research & Development Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was established in 1971 with the development of an early augmentative communication system, which was…

The Mayo Innovation Scholars Program introduces undergraduates to technology transfer in biomedical sciences by having teams of students from multiple disciplines (e.g., biology, chemistry, economics, and business) analyze inventions in development at the Mayo Clinic. Over 6 months, teams consult with inventors, intellectual property experts, and…

Universities and their inventors earned more than $1.8-billion from commercializing their academic research in the 2011 fiscal year, collecting royalties from new breeds of wheat, from a new drug for the treatment of HIV, and from longstanding arrangements over enduring products like Gatorade. Northwestern University earned the most of any…

Sarah L. Kieweg had her own nice surprise when the University of Central Florida contacted her. She understood quite a bit about her father's pioneering work on artificial intelligence in the 1990s. Still, in 2006, eight years after he died of a heart attack, at age 50, the call from the university came out of the blue: some of James R. Driscoll's…

This article reports that young inventors at a Maryland high school are not only learning scientific principles, but also teamwork and the tenets of patent law. Twice a week, 10 members of the Clarksburg High School's Coyote Inventors Club gather in a second-floor computer lab to peck away at building a deceptively simple device: a cable that…

Australian governments in recent years have invested substantially in innovation and research commercialisation with the aim of enhancing international economic competitiveness, making research findings more readily available to research users, and supporting economic and social development. Although there have been a number of evaluations of…

This article reports on a conflict between the inventor of a medicine for dry eyes and the university where she worked, which highlights the pitfalls in commercialization of academic discoveries. Renee L. Kaswan, the former professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Georgia has been prodding the institution to be more aggressive in…

In some US states, policy makers, pressed by local and regional industrial interests, are debating how to "reform" technology transfer at public universities. "Reform" in this context is generally understood to mean redirecting university technology transfer activities to increase the benefits of state-funded research to local industries.…

Immigrants are exceptionally important for U.S. technology development, accounting for almost half of the country's Ph.D. workforce in science and engineering. Most notably, the contribution of Chinese and Indian scientists and entrepreneurs in U.S. high-technology sectors increased dramatically in the 1990s. These ethnic scientific communities…

The Entrepreneurial University is a failed idea. This is not to disparage the entrepreneurial activities of faculty, graduates and students. Neither is it to criticise industry-sponsored research and co-authorship. University research and higher education have a role in innovation. However, if entrepreneurialism is institutionalised as a policy of…

In the years since the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, university technology transfer success has been measured primarily by traditional metrics such as numbers of patents filed, revenue obtained from licensed patents and numbers of start-up companies founded to commercialize university intellectual property. Intellectual property (IP)…

Many jurisdictions, including the European Patent Office (EPO), have opposition proceedings in which an interested third party can challenge the validity of the claims of an issued patent. The United States Congress is considering legislation that would introduce opposition proceedings in the USA. This paper reviews the existing EPO and proposed…

The court's decision in Madey v Duke University in 2002 and the subsequent denial of the petition for certiorari set out in an Amicus curiae brief in June 2003 have focused attention on the societal role played by US universities. The decision, according to the above petition, effectively 'seals the coffin on the experimental use exception for…

American universities are purported to excel at technology transfer. This assumption, however, masks important features of American innovation. Attempts to emulate the US example must recognize the heterogeneity of its industries and institutions of higher education. Stanford University and the biomedical cluster in Boston, Massachusetts,…