The Commercialization of Academia

 In 1980 the US Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act or the Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter on Dec. 12 of that year. Prior to its passage utility patents that resulted from federally funded research were retained by the federal government. Public Law 96-517, as it is recorded, allows the federal government to assign patents resulting from publicly funded research to the contractors involved and the non-profit institutions engaged in that research. Federal agencies were allowed to grant exclusive licenses to inventions belonging to the federal government.

This means that the while the expenses of research were covered by the taxpayers the economic fruits went to "non-profits" and contractors who had already been paid to do the work.

An example is this university which has been instrumental in the formation of 212 start-up companies in the last 14 years based on patents it owns. AUTM, a Washington, D.C. non-profit, encourages and coordinates relationships and technology transfer between research institutions and corporations. 

IP Watchdog has this to say about the subject:

 Over $71 billion USD was spent in federally sponsored research at universities in 2018 in the US alone. Approximately $2.94 billion in licensing revenue was generated in 2018 directly from the process of taking academic inventions to market, otherwise known as technology transfer (TT). Including federal laboratories, the US invests more than $100 billion each year in federal research funding, with a cumulative spending of more than a trillion dollars over the last 15 years.

Federal research funding is a big deal for academic research and for businesses wishing to use their discoveries for commercial purposes. In an article from 2016 at Nature.com's website, this quote appears:

 “We're at another inflection point,” says John Swartley, executive director of the Penn Center for Innovation (PCI), the technology-transfer office at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. To face these challenges, technology-transfer offices need to find new ways to work with private companies, scientists and outside investors, while maintaining their own integrity. “We can never forget that we are, at core, an academic institution,” says Swartley.

Maintaining their own integrity is turning out to be the difficult part, if, in fact, it remains a goal in the years since 2016.