Dive Brief:
- Clifford Gross, founder of a global intellectual property investment company, said in an interview with Forbes that 80% of universities' 100,000 annual innovations often never leave campus.
- Connections between the marketplace and university scholarship are important, Gross says, because universities with lower risk, publicly-funded research capacity can constantly innovate, whereas the same might be difficult for companies lacking R&D budgets. Accessing university IP can add to value to industry, while helping universities transfer their intellectual capital development.
- Ultimately, the largest gap in universities' IP not making it to market is lack of communication between institutions and industry, Gross explained. Institutions can also do a better job of making innovations market-ready, by developing prototypes, getting IP from other universities, and assessing technical standing.
Dive Insight:
Institutions which invest heavily in building a culture of invention and discovery could strengthen their brands by eventually having those technologies spread to the market and different institutions. While most research universities and colleges have standard patent and IP agreements, Gross highlighted an important figure — which is most still don't disseminate their IP at all, doing a disservice to investments they are putting into more faculty, research centers, and other areas of innovation. It also eliminates new potential sources of revenue that can come back to these institutions, as products don't get developed.
Leaders can take extra steps to ensure innovations happening on campus can actually be commercialized within industry. This includes holding researchers to making their IP more market-ready, rather than just leaving their research in raw data form. Understanding how to do this will come from better communication with companies actually trying to acquire and use technologies developed by institutions, so that the process of licensing and getting products to the market becomes much easier.