history of the DDG

Agreed.

Career options for Ph.D.s in physics, for example, have shifted quite dramatically and the usual academic path -- graduate school -> postdoc

-> faculty position -- has become far more difficult. Plus, the Bayh-Dole Act changed the landscape. The law simplified "technology transfer" and changed the legal presumption about who ought to own new ideas; towards private enterprise. The provisions encourage universities to leverage their research and pursue licenses with business. It also encourages them to share their take with the inventors, personally. Soon, many better minds left basic reseach to form their own companies and license their work from the university. Bayh-Dole says the university is to use the proceeds for "scientific research or education," but there are no instructions. The money is unrestricted and worth a lot more to a university than many of their grants and other sources are. But the one thing universities never seem to use this money for is tuition.

Those that stay and struggle in basic research in academia have, to a person, other reasons than money as their primary reason.

Jon

Patents are almost always assigned to the institution who paid the inventor's salary or furnished the facilities. All the inventor gets is his name on the filing. The big universities have a legal department that licenses patents, sometimes to the inventor if he spins out, but not usually.

Yup; the VC's usually wind up owning most of the goodies. Thay's smarter than the academics about stuff like that.

John

More than 3/4 of the PhD's I've known in the semiconductor industry go back to academia by "invitation"... the company "invites" them to take a walk because their productivity (think saleable) doesn't match their salary.

...Jim Thompson

Those who can, do. Those who can't, get tenure.

Those that can't teach, run for public office.

Those that can't get elected become bureaucrats.

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

Feckless/Reckless Nancy Piglosivich should resign She'll do anything to further her Socialist Party Even if it makes the USA a Third-World Nation

No, not here. By contract, employers, including universities generally own any patents. Even without a contract, a company may well have a claim in anything their resources or equipment helped create.

A university I know demands 50% of any consulting fees earned by their employees _off-hours_. And this applies for a year after they leave.

That seems to happen, sometimes rather transparently. I gather you've seen it too.

Regards, James Arthur

That only tells half the story (i.e. a lie). The patent may "belong" to the inventor but the patent rights belong usually belong to the person who paid the inventor to invent.

You condone fraud?

Who gets the profits from these "science sites"?

The intellectual property belongs to the corporation if you invent it whilst you are employed by that corporation in most employment contracts but the inventor still has the credit of the invention. And most companies do develop their better inventions. And decent companies do look after their inventors (I expect there are counter examples)

But I have seen the system cause problems where important life saving inventions were not exploited "because it wasn't part of the core business". Worse still they could not be bothered to licence the patent to an engineering firm that wanted to make the device.

An academic research laboratory is not set up to do product development or marketting so some alternative is needed. And most places do not want to lose their most talented technicians or researcher. A local science park fits very nicely alongside these institutions.

No. I am describing what happens if you don't have the right sort of support in place to allow academic inventions to be developed to market.

This was the original rationale behind the institution set up to help researcher to patent academic UK inventions in the first place.

The university (or college in some collegiate universities), the venture capitalists and the academics in roughly equal measure. The academics tend to end up with somewhat less if they have to go through refinance later (and many do so losing a nother chunk of the equity).

Regards, Martin Brown