Attending a recent meeting on innovation and business-university interactions in the UK, it was difficult to avoid the impression that little had changed over the past 10 years. There have been enormous changes in the world of business and in universities, to be sure, but relations between the two sides seem to be the source of as much anxiety as ever. Indeed, there are new problems that did not exist before.
Take intellectual property, for example. Decades of angst about British inventions being commercialized abroad – liquid crystal displays, for instance – and more recent calls for universities to be more entrepreneurial have resulted in stand-offs between businesses and university researchers as they attempt to deal with each other.
This is one of the issues that has come to light in a review of business-university collaboration that is being carried out by Richard Lambert, a former editor of the Financial Times, for the UK Treasury. “A number of businesses reported that some universities had become too aggressive in their valuation of, and negotiations over, intellectual property,” Lambert writes in an interim report. “For their part, universities reported that business had become accustomed to receiving university intellectual property for free in the past and therefore had unrealistic expectations.”
As Lita Nelsen, director of the technology-licensing office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pointed out recently, income from technology transfer is highly unpredictable – she likened it to a lottery – and universities should not rely on it as a major source of income. This is an area where the government could take action: universities should be provided with resources for technology transfer, but should not be expected to rely on revenue from such ventures to support their core missions of teaching and research. If a company pays for the research, it is entitled to expect most of the profits that ultimately result from the research.
On the other hand, if an academic comes up with money-spinning idea on their own, they can license the technology from a position of strength or form a spin-off company. Recent research shows that more and more academics are doing just this, and that the number of spin-offs as a proportion of spending on research is higher in the UK than in the US.
If Lambert’s interim findings are any guide, his final report – which should be published before the end of the year – is going to be more critical of the business world than the academic sector. “While the research output of British universities compares favourably with that of many other developed countries,” he writes, “relatively few British companies and companies based in Britain are research-led.” However, if British firms continue to consistently spend less on R&D as a proportion of turnover than their main competitors – and, remarkably, continue to claim that it is difficult to find out “who does what?” in universities – the anxiety about business-university interactions is going to continue.
