Purpose

U.S. universities never used to be active in patenting and licensing their research results. All that has changed. The 1980 Bayh-Dole Act (enabling universities to patent and license innovations resulting from federally-funded research) set up a uniform federal patent policy for academic institutions. University patenting and licensing have increased dramatically since then.

Recent upsurge of privatization of university research, particularly in biotechnology, has attracted considerable attention from the scientific community and university administrators. Government officials and the general public have expressed concerns over the benefits and costs of increasing privatization of university research. At stake, according to many, is the traditional commitment to open science and the free dissemination of information in the public domain.

The purpose of this work is to explore the above ideas and add reasoned substance to the continued debate.

Project & Objectives

To better understand the net effect on aggregate social welfare of university patenting and licensing activities in agricultural biotechnology, the project will:

1. Construct a database of university agbiotech licensing agreements, licensees of biotechnologies, the products developed from the licenses and the research inputs invested in them, and the associate university research inputs and characteristics.
2. Analyze these primary data and construct measures of benefits and costs of university patenting and licensing.
3. Develop a structural model permitting tests of the impact of university patenting and licensing on university research and on the downstream research, which builds on university proprietary technologies to develop commercial agbiotech products.
4. Employ steps (1) through (3) to examine the efficacy of university patenting and licensing in enhancing innovation and in furthering the commercialization of biotechnology products in agriculture.

Impact

The research should shed light on the social benefits and costs of the trend toward privatization of university research, with particular reference to exclusivity/openness tradeoffs, licensing revenue/cost issues, and the consequences of university-industry relationships.