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 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…

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…

Describes how universities can end up holding an empty bag when companies with which they have formed technology-licensing deals go under. (EV)

Uses the University of Michigan and three other colleges (University of Maryland--Baltimore County, Brigham Young University, and Washington University) to illustrate the varied approaches to capitalizing financially on campus research by deciding what constitutes success. Includes a "tech-transfer scorecard" listing the highest-ranking…

Effective June 8, 1995, new patent laws resulting from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) will become effective. Some would protect researcher rights to intellectual property. Others may make it harder for institutions to commercialize on faculty and graduate student research due to shortened patent terms. (MSE)

Discusses the controversy over the arrangement between UMI, a company that stores, reproduces, and sells master's theses and doctoral dissertations, and the commercially based online retailer, Contentville.com. Both American and Canadian scholars have been surprised to find their work being offered, without their permission, for sale online by…

Describes how universities try, and sometimes fail, to prevent the revenue based on lucrative licenses from being lost when professors or graduate students commercialize inventions themselves. (EV)

The Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University has created a profitable program for commercializing student and faculty research, investing with three venture-capital companies that agreed to pay extra attention to the university's technological innovations and developing an office park to promote local economic development and generate…

A Michigan court has ruled that a Wayne State University (Michigan) chemistry professor appropriated a trade secret from a Massachusetts chemist for whom he was consulting and incorporated it into his own patent application, violating a written agreement. The university contends its pursuit of the patent was not improper. (MSE)

While Microsoft Corporation officials state unequivocally that the company does not want to get into the business of higher education, the company and its chairman have been quietly acquiring rights to intellectual property and creating software rich in academic content. College administrators, nervous about competition for students, are concerned…