The domain google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. Prior to that, Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, were a couple of computer science doctoral candidates at Stanford University.

Take two theses, one algorithm, an initial prototype that used nearly half of Stanford’s entire network bandwidth, and a patent citing another patent that turned into the Chinese search engine Baidu, and you’ve got Google, a trillion dollar Tech Company.

And it all started with a university research project.

The university research community has always been under outside pressure — political, economic and institutional — that has had the potential to impact, for better or worse, the nature and direction of academic research. In recent years, a new type of pressure has descended on university-based research: increased emphasis on the commercialization of research.

Commercialization is the process by which a product or service is introduced to the market. It is the entrepreneurial push that translates research discoveries and new technologies from laboratory to market. Universities around the world offer incubation and accelerator programs and assistance to commercialize the research conducted in their facilities.

This makes sense: Research that can be used to solve pressing problems or improve quality of life are most impactful when in the hands of those who can benefit from them. To reach these people, research needs to hit the market. Additionally, taking innovations to market also provides an economic benefit. Whether it be through licensing technology to other companies or developing startups, commercialization provides new revenue streams.

A CRUCIAL ROLE

“Universities play a crucial role in society as producers and transmitters of knowledge,” says Parimal Patel, University of Sussex. “In recent years, the discussion about whether universities can encompass a third mission of economic development, in addition to research and teaching, has received greater attention. Many have argued that within the remit of the third mission, university-industry research collaborations are extremely important mechanisms for generating technological spillovers. At the same time, many governments have introduced an increasing range of policies encouraging the involvement of universities in technology transfer.”

Things have not always been so. Licensing of inventions by academics became prevalent only in the early 20th century: In 1908, Frederick Cottrell received a patent to reduce industrial pollution, and in 1925, the University of Wisconsin-Madison founded its technology-transfer office to disseminate Harry Steenbock’s discovery that irradiating food to increase vitamin D could treat rickets.

Quaker Oats requested that technology, and the office licensed it in 1927.

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IMAGE: Abjad Design

The UK established the National Research Development Corporation in 1948, leading to the first hovercraft in the 1950s, but it took until 1985 for an increase in academic entrepreneurship to appear.

Things changed in the US with the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act. Formerly known as the Patent and Trademark Act Amendments, the Bayh-Dole Act created a uniform patent policy among the federal agencies that fund research, motivating more and more universities to become actively involved in the transfer of technology from lab to market. In the US in 2018, approximately USD$2.94 billion in licensing revenue was generated directly from technology transfer.

Now, there’s another push.

THE ARAB WORLD ENTERS THE CHAT

Sami Bashir, director of Khalifa University’s technology management and innovation office, says it is increasingly evident that universities in the Middle East want to make their mark in the world of research and development through sponsored research and technology transfer.

“In recent years, there has been a great emphasis in the Arab world for universities to incorporate an ‘economic development mission’ within their strategic vision and operation so as to contribute towards their local and regional economies,” Bashir says. “Innovation and entrepreneurship have become cornerstones for the vision of new economies in this region. Universities are viewed as promising outlets that not only provide scientific discoveries, but can also create business opportunities in the form of technology-based startups.”

DWINDLING RESOURCES

Bashir says he believes the drive for economic benefits from scientific research stems from the global economic downturn and the drop in oil prices. He says most Arab countries have relied on natural resources, such as oil and minerals, to support their economies, but these resources face scarcity and environmental challenges that would slow or hinder their economies in the near- and long-term. Accordingly, he says, research and education funding has increased in most Arab countries.

“Technology patenting and commercialization has increasingly led to significant advances in cutting-edge research, focusing primarily on innovations in life sciences, information technology, and software and data management,” Bashir says. “Unfortunately, the existing regulatory framework does not suit development of new technologies, nor the creation of technology-based startups, but this is changing. Additionally, universities are steadily being regarded as more relevant to the technology marketplace and easy to do business with. As a result, more universities have begun to create formal research-administration or technology-transfer offices to support translation of business ideas into viable technology products or processes.”

NOT EVERYONE IS A FAN, THOUGH

Ubaka Ogbogu, associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta, Canada, says the increasing push to commercialize university research has emerged as a significant science-policy challenge, with socio-economic benefits but also potential risks that are not as often considered.

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“Studies of research-policy trends suggest that the commercialization ethos and associated pressures are unlikely to relent anytime soon and may, in fact, become the central or defining mission of university-based research,” Ugbogu said. “These studies also show that the push to commercialize is almost always presented as an unqualified social good that warrants broad governmental and institutional focus and support. Conversely, its risks and challenges are largely absent from policy statements and discussions.

A 2014 Pew Research Center survey of members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that 47 percent believed the pressure to develop marketable products was having an undue influence on the direction of their research, while 69 percent viewed a focus on projects expected to yield rapid results as having a similar influence.

Hyun Ju Jung and Jeongsik Lee, both at the Georgia Institute of Technology, reviewed nanotechnology patents filed between 1996 and 2007 in a study conducted in 2014, finding that the “government-initiated emphasis on commercialization” of US university research “may undermine open paths towards novel technologies and hinder explorations of unknown fields.”

NARROWING RESEARCH SCOPE

The government-initiated emphasis in this case came in the form of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), a US government science and technology program launched in 2000. Jung and Lee consider the NNI a policy intervention that targeted the commercialization of technology with a focused research direction to promote national economic growth. They found that once the NNI was implemented, US universities have benefited from increased interest — and funding — from industry but have narrowed down their research scope. This ultimately reduces their discovery of potential novel technologies, meaning they are less likely to generate technological breakthroughs — which “appear[s] to be inconsistent with the NNI’s objectives,” as the authors say.

Nanotechnology may be a narrow area to focus on, but these findings do suggest that a focus on commercialization forces a narrow focus for research.
Ogbogu was hardly surprised: “Several studies have found associations between commercialization activity and data withholding, the erosion of collaborative research relationships, and an unwillingness or reluctance to engage in certain research trends, such as open science initiatives, which conflict with the financial considerations that underlie the pursuit of commercialization.”

A POSITIVE IMPACT THROUGH KNOWLEDGE

One important aspect of knowledge sharing is the capacity to move research results from the laboratory into new or improved products and services in the marketplace. Commercialization of research is an important part of how science makes it to the public, which Ogbogu acknowledges. “It is a primary means through which medical products and services reach the market and consumers, which can, in turn, advance public health.”

He’s not wrong: A study by Boston University found 153 drugs and vaccines were developed by public research institutions between 1981 and 2011. The Covid-19 mRNA vaccine originated from research at a University of Pennsylvania bench.

Consider also, that sharing knowledge from a university in an open-access manner would result in another company springing up to profit from its usage. If a company will exist or a license could be issued anyway, why shouldn’t a university benefit directly?

This is where the publish-versus-patent argument comes in.

PUBLISHING DILEMA

In most jurisdictions, a patent cannot be obtained if an invention was previously known or used by other people in the US. Understandable, but publishing results counts as making an invention known. To be awarded a patent, you have to file your application before you publish, speak about or present your work.
In a publish-or-perish world, however, researchers can hardly afford to not publish papers, present at meetings or discuss their work.

Gangotri Dey works in Cornell University’s technology-transfer office, focusing on the physical sciences. She recognizes that the main goal of most of the university’s inventors is to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals but highlights that this differs between colleges: “A newly appointed assistant professor in the chemistry department is more eager to publish, whereas a person from an engineering college will likely think of patenting their invention before it is sent out for publication.”

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In Dey’s experience, of the academics that do file and secure a patent, less than 10 percent are licensed to companies, with life sciences and the medical school securing the most funding. The physical science division brings in less than 10 percent of the total revenue, showing that market success also tends to be field-specific and university goal-oriented. The other issue is the timeline.

“A typical patent takes about four years to be issued,” says Dey. “This varies and some fields are so heavily backlogged it may take ten years to get a patent. I assume there is no peer-review journal article that takes this long! My biggest concern though is that we are comparing apples to oranges in this scenario. A peer-reviewed journal article should be for the basic science that needs to be communicated to the public that is paying for this research with their taxes. A patent is filed to benefit the public from a ready product. You can win a Nobel Prize for an invention, but you might not be able to patent that same invention. In my view, you can’t compare the two.”

BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

So is it possible to have the best of both worlds? At the Khalifa University technology-transfer office, Bashir says with a laugh: “That’s where we come in!”
Time to visit your local TTO, folks.

THE SHIFT TO STARTUPS

In recent years, there has been a paradigmatic shift toward commercializing technology through startups, rather than patents. University inventions tend to need substantial development before they are ready to go to market, and universities are now trending toward funding these startups. Potential is evident: Stanford University alone birthed Google and HP.

Thomas Astebro, professor of entrepreneurship at HEC Paris, says the dramatic increase in the rate of university spinoffs can be attributed to the germination of biomedical research in the 1970s; the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980; increased financing of research by industry; changes in university guidelines and behavior; and changes in the scientific ethos of faculty and researchers.

Creating companies takes extensive work, expertise and focus, and academic institutions are not historically designed or optimized for this. Those that can shift focus quickly and create and support startup companies built around innovations designed within their walls can increase the likelihood that those innovations make an impact. Just as university research creates many innovations, universities can also participate in the startup-creation process in many ways.

LOCAL CHALLENGES

“We can and should learn from the experiences of universities in the US and Europe, but the adoption of impactful technology-transfer models in the Arab world must be established through our own learning and experiences in ever-changing operating environments,” Bashir says. He says he believes universities in the Arab region experience challenges that can be categorized as internal and external, with the most pressing being the adoption of intellectual-property policies.

Among internal challenges, most universities seem to lack policies and guidelines that clarify the rights of researchers whose discoveries are commercialized. The lack of such policies renders researchers more apprehensive in disclosing inventions to their universities or technology-transfer offices, Bashir says, which in turn reduces the chance of research commercialization.

Additionally, universities in the Middle East have been traditionally viewed as beit al hikma, or “houses of wisdom” — entities that provide academic scholarly activities, not industry-relevant applied research and development.

Establishing progressive external industry partnerships will be essential for attracting industry funds to university research activities and enhancing the delivery of research results to market.

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“The biggest challenge is we mostly deal with technology readiness level one or, at maximum, level two,” says Dey. Technology readiness levels are used to assess the maturity of a particular technology, with level one the lowest and level nine the highest. When a technology is at level one, scientific research is just beginning to be translated into future research and development, while level two occurs once the basic practical applications have been applied to those research findings. Level two is very speculative as there is little to no experimental proof of concept for the technology.

“University research does not easily translate into a patent, product or company at such an early stage,” adds Dey. “But this problem can be partially mitigated with more industry-university collaborative research or sponsored research projects.”

As far as external challenges, the issue of patent or IP law comes top of the list.

“Patent law in general has been enacted only recently in the Arab world; for instance, in Saudi Arabia in 1985,” Bashir says. “In most cases, the patent system was established to protect technologies and businesses coming from outside and not home-grown inventions and technologies. It’s clear that the patent legal framework here needs modernization and reforms to accommodate for the registration and protection of research discoveries coming out of universities.

“Technology transfer is not a stationary model. It is a dynamic and progressive model and continuously needs evaluation, assessment and modernization to be relevant and fit for purpose.”