University ownership has crushed the economic potential of publicly funded research

[Christos and Merle, “University ownership and information about the entrepreneurial opportunity in commercialisation: a systematic review and realist synthesis of the literature,” The Journal of Technology Transfer volume 46, 01/04/2020, p. 1487–1513, Springer, accessed 07/17/2024, BKM GDI]

Going back to the 1980s a new consensus emerged within policy and research communities: namely that publicly funded research at universities can stimulate innovation and economic growth (for a review see Mowery et al. 2004). This, in turn, led to a radical review of the role of universities in society and prompted the introduction of a set of policy reforms aimed at facilitating the exploitation of the research outcomes generated by academics. Foremost amongst these was the Bayh–Dole Act (variants of which were subsequently adopted across most developed countries) that conferred to universities ownership of the outcomes of academic research, replacing legislation that (1) made them widely available to the public through dedication to the public domain (more recently revived in the form of commons type of solutions) or (2) inventor ownership. Both of these were viewed as sub-optimal, arguably, resulting in the under-exploitation of large numbers of patents on account of insecurity regarding their ownership (Mowery et al. 2004). The new arrangements were believed to provide the appropriate incentive structure for universities to ‘harvest’ research outcomes produced by academics, invest in commercialisation, and act as engines of innovative activity (Colyvas et al. 2002; Siegel et al. 2003). Inherently positivist theoretical models developed in the mid-2000s, discussed in more detail in the following section, provided an ex-post justifcation for the new property rights regime. These contend that the attainment of a critical mass of protected research outcomes is important in allowing universities to bear the cost of accessing information about the entrepreneurial opportunity and to invest in acquiring the expertise, embodied in technology transfer ofcers (hereafter TTOs), needed for commercialisation (Hoppe and Ozdenoren 2005; Hellmann 2005). However, to date research revolving around information regarding the entrepreneurial opportunity has remained in the shadows. This is because the commercialisation of university IP is viewed fundamentally as a challenge of mobilising new technical information (the term is used interchangeably with that of the research outcome) produced through academic research (Baldini 2009; Wu et al. 2015; Halilem et al. 2017; Kalantaridis 2019). We believe that there is merit in bringing the disparate body of research on information regarding the entrepreneurial opportunity together through the conduct of systematic review of the literature as a new wave of scepticism about the efectiveness of the now dominant property rights regime emerges. This is because, despite considerable success in mobilising research outcomes—manifested in a profound growth in the number of disclosures and patents granted (Siegel et al. 2007; Lemley 2008; Siegel and Wright 2015), returns to university commercialisation, viewed here as a proxy for the value of the innovations introduced, remain modest (Abrams et al. 2009; Swamidass and Vulasa 2009; Valdivia 2013). Thus, ‘only about 5% of patents are licensed at most universities … [t]he rest are a drain on office resources … because of required maintenance and legal fees’ (Ledford 2013, 472). This constitutes a potentially sub-optimal situation, one of under-exploitation of patents that impact adversely on economic growth, not greatly dissimilar to that that prompted the introduction of reform in property rights through the Bayh–Dole Act. It also relates to current debates about the evolving contribution of universities, the recipients of public funding for the purposes of research, in society (Maassen et al. 2019).