The Quote of Note is a series of links to previous P6 posts.
...and this, from the linked article:
The report found that more than one-quarter of the scientists who were awarded patents said they had started their own business — "an astonishingly high rate of entrepreneurship," the authors said.
"The investments in research and development are spilling out into the economy more than was appreciated," said David B. Audretsch, an economist at Indiana University, who also holds an appointment at the Max Planck institute. "These scientists are doing a lot more than sitting in labs and publishing papers."
...and this, from the abstract of the report cited by said article.
At present, only 20 percent of all basic research in the United States is performed by the private sector. Colleges and universities account for 60 percent of such research, with government accounting for the remaining amounts. Washington is the largest funder of basic research, paying for 57 percent of the total.
“Federal investment in university research has a much bigger impact on the nation’s economy than previously thought,” said Lesa Mitchell, vice president of Advancing Innovation at the Kauffman Foundation. “We are seeing much more commercialization coming out of universities that has not been measured.”
U.S. Research Funds Often Lead to Start-Ups, Study Says
By STEVE LOHR
A new study of university scientists who received federal financing from the National Cancer Institute found that they generated patents at a rapid pace and started companies in surprisingly high numbers.
The study, the authors say, suggests that the commercial payoff for the government's support for basic research and development in the life sciences is greater than previously thought.
The paper, to be published today, comes at a time when politicians and policy makers in the United States and Europe are questioning the value of government funds invested in fundamental research. In theory, those investments should be a wise use of taxpayers' money, according to many economists, who assert that innovation must be an engine of economic growth and job creation in developed nations.
The new study, by economists at Indiana University and the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Germany, is an attempt to analyze the commercial activity of university scientists in a field where government financing of basic research has been quite generous.
Federal financing of the National Institutes of Health has not grown in the last couple of years, but it increased by two and a half times in the decade before 2005. The National Cancer Institute is the largest of the N.I.H. units, with an annual budget of $4.8 billion, and much of its spending goes to support university research.
The report's authors studied the activities of nearly 1,700 scientists who received the largest grants from the cancer institute from 1998 to 2002. In the past, most studies of patent activity by university researchers have looked at patents assigned to university technology transfer offices, the traditional path to commercializing academic research.
The study found that 70 percent of scientists whose research resulted in patents assigned their patents to technology transfer offices. The other 30 percent chose to sidestep university technology offices, often taking the more entrepreneurial path of trying commercialize their inventions on their own.
