This has been a particularly heavy period of travel for me, and I thought I would be helpful to summarize my observations and thoughts as I’ve gone round the world.
Where to start? In May and June I went to Europe twice, first to the Association of European Science and Technology Professionals (“ASTP”) 10th Anniversary Meeting and two weeks later went back to the PraxisUnico Meeting. ASTP and PraxisUnico are the two largest technology transfer associations outside North America. ASTP is a major, multinational association, with members from 35 countries. Three hundred show up at its annual meeting and its proceedings are in English. ASTP has close connections to AUTM and has leveraged the connection to come a very long way in its 10 years.
The same can be said of PraxisUnico in the UK. My personal thesis is that the UK has the most consistent, well thought out national policy for technology transfer anywhere. It was the second country after the United States to change its academic intellectual property system, returning it to the institutions when Margaret Thatcher abolished the monopoly on academic inventions that the National Research and Development Corporation had been given when it was set up in 1949 to make sure that the UK didn’t miss out on the commercial value in its academic inventions the way it had with penicillin. The British Government has carried out a series of reports, studies and analyses, starting with the Lambert Report in 2003 and totally gets it. No “Free Agency” nonsense on the other side of the pond! The government started providing “Third Stream Funding” to support technology transfer and research commercialization in 1999 and the most tangible demonstration of just how much the government gets it was in the recent budget, when most areas of the economy took a 25% cut in government funding. Science funding for British Universities was unscathed, Third Stream Funding was unscathed, and the government announced a new £200 million fund for technology transfer centers modeled on the German Fraunhofer model (which PraxisUnico promptly denounced, which I think was unwise, but that’s another story).
In August I went to the delightfully acronymed SNITTS – Swedish Network for Technology Transfer Support – in Stockholm. Sweden is the last country in Europe where the Professors Privilege or Teachers Exemption is still in force whereby the professors own their own IP. In Sweden there is a fledgling profession, desperately looking across the Atlantic to the U.S. institutional ownership model.
In September I went to India for the first time, to attend the Society for Technology Management (“STEM”) meeting. Given India’s billion plus population, I was expecting a meeting on a comparable scale. I was surprised to find a meeting of fewer than 100. Indian universities are not research universities as we know them, and public sector research is through the institutes – the Indian Institutes of Technology (“IIT”’s), the National Institute of Immunology, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, etc. The “Indian Bayh-Dole Act”, still to be passed by the Indian Parliament, has some serious problems – starting with the motivation for passing it to be reduce Indian universities’ need for government support, and going onto a “money back” guarantee (with interest, no less) if the research project doesn’t produce the desired outcome. Companies are not much more sophisticated, but the role of GE is pervasive. That said, there is an immense thirst to learn how to interact with industry, and we are moving forward with our partner, STEM, to implement the MOU we signed with them to provide training services. The IC2 institute of the University of Texas Austin has been doing pioneering work with some of the IIT’s in India.
The next trip was to Portugal for the second annual meeting of UTEN, the fledgling technology transfer association. Maria Oliveira of the University of Porto had been a fellow in my office for three months this spring and arranged my invitation. Again I foundIC2 had been helping the Portuguese for a number of years and they had also had funded an MIT-Portugal program. These initiatives had born fruit. I found sophisticated technologies well thought through, packaged and presented. Portugal is well on its way to being a full member of the European technology transfer mainstream.
From Portugal, I went to France for BioFIT, a biotechnology partnering meeting that was more company than university oriented.
The most recent meeting was to attend the Annual Meeting of Knowledge Commercialization Australasia (KCA) in Canberra, Australia. KCA is one of our partners in ATTP. Found a small but vibrant and sophisticated profession that has already had a number of world scale hits, including Gardasil, Relenza, cochlear implants and the Wireless LAN
I came back from Australia via Taiwan, where AUTM’s last VP International Relations, Paul Liu, had arranged a conference on the 10th anniversary of Taiwan’s Fundamental Science and Technology Act (“FSTA”). This is ostensibly Taiwan’s equivalent of the Bayh-Dole Act. Paul had told me there were issues with the FSTA, but I had no idea how bad the problems were till this conference. The greatest strength of Bayh-Dole is how the government got completely out of the way and gave all responsibility to the institution. The FSTA leaves the Taiwanese government totally in control. Taiwanese institutions can’t license to foreign corporations without government permission, which takes two - three years to obtain and is often denied (TRIPS anyone?). The purpose of the meeting was to identify the issues and convince the government that changes are needed.
Paul had invited a number of people from Japan who gave an account of how technology transfer had evolved in Japan. The top universities in Japan are the 70 elite National Universities, who perform the bulk of the academic research in Japan and now do the overwhelming bulk of technology transfer. These were owned by the government and the employees and professors were civil servants. Technology transfer got started when in 1998 when the government created external technology transfer offices that were not government-owned. Next, in 1999, the Japanese Bayh-Dole Act was passed. However, being part of government, universities couldn’t own their own IP until the government privatized them and changed them into non-profit corporations, which occurred in 2004. At that point, many of the National Universities created their own TLO’s. This rendered the external TLO’s that the government had created superfluous, and it was recently reported that the funding for these external entities had been eliminated.
Paul had also invited Jasmine Kway from Singapore to the meeting. The Singapore government is putting a lot of funding into increasing Singapore’s science and technology base, including commercialization. Jasmine mentioned that the main science funding agency, A*Star, can take title to any invention it funded – i.e., an automatic “march-in” at any time.
My conclusion is that technology transfer is continuing to spread around the world. Different countries are at different stages, but one of the legacies of Bayh-Dole that we should keep in mind during the upcoming 30th anniversary celebrations is that Bayh-Dole’s impact is spreading around the world. Country after country is adopting the “institutional ownership model” for managing academic technologies Bayh-Dole espoused to harness the power of its academic researchers and drive economic growth through a robust technology transfer profession.