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The Bayh-Dole Act was a watershed event in American higher education and innovation. The legislation, enacted almost 40 years ago, gave universities, faculty members, and student inventors the rights to patent discoveries and unleashed an era of inventive collaboration that has helped shape American competitiveness globally. But amid the resounding success of the Act remains a difficult truth for innovative and entrepreneurial universities: Only a handful of highly successful institutions with blockbuster portfolios generate enough licensing income to support the cost of university technology transfer. For everyone else the process is a wash or even a loss.
In recognition that most universities need financial support for the costly process of patenting new inventions emerging from federally funded research, the National Institute of Standards’s Return on Investment Initiative Final Green Paper that was published in April 2019 recommends allocating a small portion of federal grant support to ...
