With record-breaking amounts of money in tech investments streaming around the globe, you would think that investors are funding nearly every innovation possible. Yet investment dollars often overlook one of the greatest innovation incubators: the university system.
The same environment that gave us everything from flu vaccines to touchscreens to Google has countless equally outstanding innovations awaiting behind institutional gates. With decreasing federal funding and essentially stagnant commercial R&D, it is more critical than ever that universities and industries evolve and adapt to bring scientific innovations to market.
I am fortunate to come from a family of brilliant doctors and scientists. My father is Charles Helmstetter, a retired Florida Institute of Technology and Roswell Park Cancer Institute cell biologist. For nearly 40 years, he was one of the most prolific and successful recipients of National Institutes of Health funding, arguably the most competitive research dollars to obtain. Throughout his career, he made many discoveries, the most significant being a system to produce “synchronized” bacterial cells at the same age for cancer and other studies – the “baby machine.” Yet, none of his discoveries made it to market. And he didn’t care – he even posted instructions on how to build your baby machine on YouTube!
He was motivated by the purity of science, discovery, sharing openly with integrity, advancing science, and ultimately, in his case, cancer research. His goal was to galvanize his scientific contributions by publishing his discoveries in academic papers to be further leveraged and developed by his peers.
My uncle, F. William “Bill” Studier, a retired SUNY-Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory geneticist and National Academy of Sciences member who was one of the pioneers of slab-gel among many other significant contributions electrophoresis — a mainstay for modern biotech labs — echoed similar sentiments. “It’s to everyone’s benefit to patent discoveries that have commercial application, and it’s a good idea to make it easy for researchers to apply for a patent,” he said in a Brookhaven article, “but my work is not aimed at commercial applications. I’m interested in basic research.”
I would argue that these two researchers’ work toward addressing some of the greatest global challenges was more important than the commercialization of their marketable discoveries. Yet, they clearly missed an opportunity.
Let’s take a closer look at three of the challenges behind stalled or stranded university innovation.
Publish or Perish
The university tenure system has long been viewed as a significant barrier to an entrepreneurial or commercialization mindset with faculty. The tenure system, which primarily rewards teaching and publication with career stability and advancement, often encourages this culture. The insinuation is that commercialization is, at best, a distraction. While I’m not here to debate what is and is not unadulterated science, I will say that there is a false trade-off in this line of thinking, one that is accompanied by great consequences.
No Funding or Time
I see it repeatedly: groundbreaking research stalled at universities after federal funding is exhausted, even with discovery objectives achieved. From game-changing vaccines to environmentally sustainable fertilizers, innovations stall out long before realizing their potential to help humanity. Most science is federally funded, and these funds run dry before real-world application can be achieved. Scientists publish and move on to their next endeavor, often stranding innovations.
However, researchers increasingly connect with private industry to obtain “applied” research and development funding. With this industry funding comes the potential for expectation misalignment: Businesses prioritize real-world proof and speed-to-market, which doesn’t typically offer scientists enough time to fulfill their goals. Often, there is a direct, inverse correlation between the time required to achieve commercial success and the industry’s willingness to fund the associated research.
Proof varies by industry. In my world of tech and animal health, it could mean proving vaccine efficacy in a target species, such as cattle, for a vaccine that was only funded through the rodent test phase. It could also mean a new crop trait grown successfully in growth chambers and greenhouses that still needs proof in real-world conditions where the crop will increase to prove resilience against weather, disease, and natural predators.
Risk-averse and ROI-sensitive businesses offer researchers a window that is too short of proving their concepts for the real world and achieving their scientific objectives. A recent faculty member told me that he is “tired of being treated like a contractor,” unable to stray from a designed scope of work to yield better results. The pace of business often won’t allow the scientific process to take the necessary time. And that’s not the only tug-of-war between the university and commercial sectors.
Intellectual Property Control
Intellectual property (IP) is another big reason innovation can languish on academic shelves. As the IP rights owner, universities can license innovation to one or more entities in return for fees and royalty streams. Understandably, the industry often wants ownership, or at a minimum, sole and exclusive rights, of any IP developed due to their funding. This position usually conflicts with university policies around developed IP and rights ownership. Many research programs have died on the vine because universities and industry couldn’t agree on IP rights and associated economics. The research is then shelved, the investment dollars can’t make it to the institution or business, and we are staring into an unbridgeable situation.
The Way Ahead
The importance of innovation creation cannot be overstated. An entrepreneurial culture and successful technology transfer of discoveries within the university environment must support this innovation creation.
There’s hope. The Millennial generation is coming into its own as a group of scientific innovators—one with a distinctively entrepreneurial mindset. New models of cooperation are evolving between the academic and commercial sectors. In our experience, even when the research doesn’t fulfill its stated objective, innovations can be harvested—and potentially commercialized—along the way.
When industry and academia align, magic can happen, given enough time. For example, we recently worked with Kansas State University and the University of California-Davis to develop a new line of heat-tolerant wheat. Ultimately, the hypothesis wasn’t supported, but the research team discovered new tools and processes to establish this trait.
To create a bridge and funnel innovations into society, universities and industry must adapt and evolve, closing the gap. Here are a few thoughts on how:
Consistent Expansion of the University Incentive Structure
Each university has a certain percentage of faculty time that can be used to consult for the industry. Encouraging more faculty to work with industry and incentivizing such work as part of the tenure equation will allow more innovations to fly free from university shelves.
In the modern environment, where we have become increasingly dependent on universities for innovation, I would argue that patents, licenses, and commercialization should be on par with teaching and publishing when considering tenure and career progression. Though progress has been made in this direction, it has been slow and limited. Universities must establish and support a culture that rewards “lab-to-market” behavior and success. Only then will we see increased alignment and collaboration with industry partners?
Give Scientists Time
Businesses treat scientists like contractors, but science does not run on the same logic system. Properly testing an innovation can take years, with course corrections and pivots along the way. Businesses balk at the funds involved in this lengthy pursuit. This presents an opportunity for investors to get in the middle, extending research funding beyond the critical basic research and discovery window.
Collaborate Around IP Rights
The recent CRISPR-Cas9 lawsuit demonstrated that licensing rights can become a messy court battle when an invention is released before the IP is secured. Litigation can delay the potential of technology. Obtaining IP rights before making research publicly available helps avoid such costs and delays. As a best practice, researchers should be encouraged to ensure IP rights under preliminary claims and publish after the research is complete. In addition, universities and industry must enter IP negotiations with open minds and create success on both sides of the collaboration equation. Demands such as unrealistic fees or blanket exclusivity can stop an IP deal.
Nobody wants to see advances stuck on shelves when they could be promoting benefits worldwide. Evolving university and industry relationships are one of the most powerful ways to launch innovations into the public’s hands. Better cooperation and new best practices will also, in the aggregate, speed up the national innovation engine by creating and furthering the adjacent inventions that naturally increase the research process.
As my uncle said, “It’s to everyone’s benefit to patent discoveries that have commercial application.” By bridging the valley between academia and the marketplace, the US will not only remove a barrier but also find new ways to retain global leadership in science.
