Recent Research: Study Questions the Success of Bayh-Dole Approach to University Patenting

Over the past 27 years, the Bayh-Dole Act has been frequently cited as critical for university tech transfer in the U.S. The Act allows universities to assume ownership over the intellectual property (IP) produced on campuses, whenever that property derives from research funded in whole or in part by the federal government. The possibility of financial returns from licensing agreements or on the sale of IP gives institutions an important incentive to engage in applied research and move their discoveries to market.

 

This approach is now gaining favor across Europe, where university ownership of patents has been much less common. Instead, patents are more often owned in whole or in part by the individual researchers and collaborators who develop the technology. Many academic and government studies have found that European universities trail their U.S counterparts both in the patenting of research and in the successful commercialization of that research. Conventional wisdom holds that without a Bayh-Dole-like incentive to produce technologies for the market, European universities persistently underachieve in technology transfer and in their impact on regional economic development.

 

Bart Verspagen of the Eindhoven University of Technology, and Gustavo Crespi and Aldo Geuna of the University of Sussex disagree. In University IPRs and Knowledge Transfer: Is the IPR Ownership Model More Efficient? the authors argue that the patenting and commercialization activities of European universities has been seriously underreported due to an inappropriately narrow definition of university technology transfer. Many studies of university patenting, including data published by the National Science Foundation, limit their focus to university-owned patents, instead of including all patents that derive from university research. This creates a bias towards U.S. schools, which, because of the Bayh-Dole Act, more frequently maintain ownership over the IP that results from their research. Only one-fifth of patents resulting from research at European universities are held by the institution itself, while U.S. schools own two-thirds of their patents, the paper notes. After accounting for all university patenting activity, the authors find that European universities only lag their U.S. counterparts by 15 percent.

 

The authors then examine the efficiency of both the U.S. and the European model in commercializing these patents. In the past, defenders of Bayh-Dole have argued that university ownership of patents creates a significant incentive to bring their research to the market. They maintain the act has prevented the U.S. from falling victim to the ‘European paradox’. European universities, which often allow their faculty to take ownership of their patented research, seem to perform well in scientific research and publishing, but are less successful at patenting, licensing and commercialization. Crespi, Geuna, and Verspagen, however, find no significant difference between the commercial use of university-owned and university-invented patents. They conclude there is no great need for Bayh-Dole-like legislation in Europe to improve patenting performance.

 

The findings suggest U.S. researchers need to re-evaluate their ideas about what constitutes successful university patenting and commercialization, but the paper also implies that American universities can be more flexible in their intellectual property arrangements. When the university is unable to find a suitable route to commercialization, granting IP rights to the individual researcher or industry collaborator may be a suitable alternative, which could still benefit the regional economy.

 

Read University IPRs and Knowledge Transfer: Is the IPR Ownership Model More Efficient? at: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/spru/documents/sewp154.pdf

 

Links to this report and more than 4,500 additional TBED-related research reports, strategic plans and other papers can be found at the Tech-based Economic Development (TBED) Resource Center, jointly developed by the Technology Administration and SSTI, at http://www.tbedresourcecenter.org/.