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…

Academic scholarship is a business, and just like any other business, it is driven largely by the incentive for profit. Those profits may or may not be financial in nature, but the potential for reward, whether it is measured in terms of a promotion or of intellectual property, underlies whatever people do in higher education. Academics don't…

According to a survey conducted by the Association of University Technology Managers, at least two dozen universities each earned more than $10-million from their licensing of rights to new drugs, software, and other inventions in the 2005 fiscal year. The number of institutions creating large numbers of spinoff companies based on their…

Biotechnology, usually commercialized in collaboration with the private sector, has been among the most fruitful university-based research endeavors, for the public as well as universities. Biological medications have made possible crucial advances in the treatment of life-threatening illnesses and yielded significant royalty streams for the…

Increased university efforts to help faculty members transfer the results of their research from the laboratory to the marketplace are posing ethical dilemmas for both institutions and scholars. Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing is cited, as are biotechnology developments, and secrecy and competitiveness issues. (LB)