US tech transfer continues at a good clip

The pace of new product introductions picked up in the US in 2006, although the number of spin-out companies from US universities, research hospitals and institutions declined compared to 2005, according to the latest survey by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). It also found total research funding rose $3.1 billion over the prior year.

“There are two things that make technology transfer work,” said Robert Tieckelmann, co-editor of the survey and assistant vice president of the Office of Technology Transfer at the State University of New York. “One is sponsored research expenditures, which went up $3 billion. They are the fuel that drives technology transfer. The second is having good people in technology transfer. Staff rose to more than 1,800.” That’s the tenth consecutive yearly increase.

Tieckelmann noted that a third of the 191 reporting institutions had three or fewer staff in their technology transfer offices, including administrative staff. “So a lot of technologies are being managed very efficiently,” he said.

Venture capital supplied initial funding for fewer than 20 per cent of new start-up companies, down slightly from 2005. States and corporate partnerships increased their funding by 5 per cent in 2006. Friends and family continued to be the most common source of initial funding for start-up companies.

In total the survey summarises data from 191 respondents. A separate report on Canada  has also been published. Data from the 2006 Licensing Activity Survey Summaries are accessible through Statistics Access for Tech Transfer or STATT, an online statistical data warehouse.

Total US patent applications increased to 15,908, up from 15,115 in fiscal 2005. But the number of patents issued continued to decrease because of delays and backlogs at the US Patent & Trademark Office.

Invention disclosures received rose to 18,874, up 1,492 or 8.6 per cent from fiscal 2005. That’s more than double the increase from fiscal 2004 to fiscal 2005.

Primarily non-exclusive licences to small companies dominated total licensing activity.

Technology transfer offices are growing among those polled, with more than 1,800 full-time equivalents, continuing a 10-year increase in staffing.

The report also includes a series of “success stories” of technology transfer, such as on biofuels and cord blood.

“AUTM members help transform academic ideas into practical products. This summary illustrates the impact our work has on society,” according to Dana Bostrom, co-editor of the survey.

Efforts are in hand to improve metrics for the survey are moving forward said Tieckelmann, who believes too much emphasis has been placed on using new technology disclosures and licensing activity as the primary measures for evaluating technology transfer. “There are other metrics, for example, inter-institutional agreements and material transfer agreements. Neither has been measured before.”

Those and other metrics will be discussed at a meeting early next year among academic, professional and governmental organisations. New metrics should begin to appear in the 2007 AUTM survey. “But we need to be careful, because we don’t want to impact previous surveys,” Tieckelmann said, emphasising the need for ongoing comparisons. “But we are looking to go beyond licensing income as a metric.”

Over the past year AUTM’s Metrics and Surveys Committee had volunteers present its methods and metrics and ask for input from participants in the US, Canada, Europe and Asia. AUTM is reaching out to US federal agencies, foundations and institutions, as well as other groups that have a similar mission and function.

According to the introduction of the 2006 survey, “Our goal is to better understand the process and value of technology transfer, so as to better capture and explain it through statistics and stories accessible to non-practitioners.”