YUFA
News
Recent Stats Can
report on the state of the intellectual property rights and
commercialization in universities.
R. MacDermid, YUFA
Communications Officer
10 Nov 03 - Statistics Canada has
just released a working paper entitled a “Survey
of intellectual property commercialization in the higher education sector,
2001.” The paper
reports on the development of research indicators of science and
technology activity in higher education and on that sector’s efforts to
transfer intellectual property into marketable products.
The paper reports on
the third survey of Property Commercialization in the Higher Education
Sector, a survey of all AUCC (Association of Universities and Colleges in
Canada) members conducted in the fall of 2001.
The report gives a broad picture of the different ways that
institutions have taken up the issue of intellectual property rights and
how those institutions have tried to capture part of the economic benefit
of intellectual property transfers to the market economy.
It is a mark of how
much universities have changed under growing commercial pressures that the
report could begin with the following:
“The focus on
improving national performance and competitiveness in the
“knowledge-based economy” has stimulated a new interest in the role of
the higher education sector and its contribution to the future economy.
The essential roles of universities are still to prepare students for the
future and to advance knowledge in the general interest of the community.
Nevertheless, the institutions themselves have also taken on an important
role as developers of new technologies with commercial applications.”
“One of the keys to
exploiting the knowledge being generated in universities is the
appropriate management of the institutions’ IP (Intellectual Property).
If inventions, ideas and creations are identified and protected, their
benefits may be shared by the institution that originated them.
Commercializing this IP further ensures that the creators/inventors and
their institutions share in the benefits of the work.”
The interest in
measuring the level of intellectual property transference is partly the
result of AUCC’s Framework Agreement on funded research which promised
that universities would “double the amount of research they perform and
triple their commercialization performance by 2010.”
The report ends with
some frank comments about the future:
“In recent years,
the Government of Canada has made substantial new investment in university
research. As a result, many of the indicators of IP commercialization
performance, such as invention disclosures, new patent applications, new
licenses, royalties received and spin-off companies created, have
increased significantly.
Many different
parties within the federal and provincial governments and outside the
government are considering the issue of how to measure performance in IP
commercialization. The focus is typically on how Canadian institutions
have performed compared to their counterparts in the US and other
countries. University and hospital technology transfer offices must also
report internally on their performance. The issue of return on investment
in university research is important if governments are to justify the
continued flow of money into this area.”
The Statistics Canada
research paper is a barometer of the growing pressure on universities and
other research producing segments of the public sector such as hospitals,
to directed research support in to short run projects whose products can
be quickly transferred to the market. More intensive measuring of intellectual property commercialization
is probably a harbinger of more directed funding, more reliance on
commercialization as a source of university funding, more disagreement
over intellectual property rights, and less effort going towards long term
research and inquiry where goals are less certain and commercialization
completely unimportant.