The University As Innovator: Bumps in the Road; Many University Technology Transfer Offices Have Become Bottlenecks Rather Than Facilitators of Innovation. New Approaches Are Needed‪.‬

For much of the past century, universities and university-based researchers have played a critical role in driving technological progress. In the process, universities have been a strong catalyst for U.S. economic growth. But a perennial challenge related to university-driven innovation has been to ensure that university structures help, not hinder, innovation and its commercialization. This challenge has been growing in recent years, and if universities fail to address it, they could gradually lose their global leadership in innovation, and U.S. economic growth could suffer. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 was supposed to make commercialization easier, faster, and more productive by clearing the way for universities to claim legal rights to innovations developed by their faculty using federal funding. But with new rights have come new layers of administration and often bureaucracies. Rather than implementing broad innovation and commercialization strategies that recognize different and appropriate pathways of commercialization, as well as multiple programs and initiatives to support each path, many universities have channeled their innovation-dissemination activities through a centralized technology transfer office (TTO).