What is the role of unversities in technology commercialization? Some starry-eyed sorts persist in believing that universities should “return to” tossing things over the transom, no economic intererest inherent or implied. That, in essence, is the naive thrust of a strident, misinformed, and economically unsophisticated piece in the current issue of Fortune magazine.
Now to be fair, I’m not denying that some universities have been overly aggressive in patent-based intellectual property protection. Case in point, Columbia’s 2002 attempt to use continuations to allow it to obtain licensing income on a biotechnology process long after its core patents had expired. But saying that some universities are intermittently over-aggressive is not the same thing as saying Bayh-Dole (the underlying rule-making that allows universities to profit from commercializing federally-funded research) is flawed and should be tossed.
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Fully agree. The other point which the article fails to point out is how hard it is to actually discover a safe and effective drug. “Miracles” are easy to talk about, but they’re much more difficult to actually produce.
We need a formal “connectivity” between angel investors and universities to repeat the success of google like technologies .