Partnerships with Private Industry:
The Wave of the Future?
Partnerships in Innovation:
the University and the Private Sector
David Schetter
Director, Office of Technology Alliances
UC Irvine
Carol Womack (UC Irvine) and Kelly Janousek (CSU Long Beach)
co-moderated this program.
ARE THESE partnerships the wave of the future? The answer
is clearly "yes"--even when a partnership fails, quite loudly and publicly,
as described by our second speaker.
The first speaker was David G. Schetter, the charter Director of
the Office of Technology Alliances at the University of California, Irvine.
The mission of the office is ". . . to foster productive, appropriate, and
mutually beneficial research interactions and transfers of technology between
UC Irvine and the private sector." Throughout, Mr. Schetter stressed ways
in which the library can, and does, play a vital role in fulfilling this
mission.
Mr. Schetter organized his remarks around context, trends,
strategies, and resources. Context encompasses the
range of university/industry interactions, technology transfer, and reasons
why universities participate. University/industry interactions include faculty
consulting, clinical trials, technology licensing, and more. Technology
transfer, operationally defined as the "transfer of proprietary rights in
intellectual property via license," may take the form of patents, copyrights,
trademarks, and trade secrets or "know-how." Reasons for university participation
include to earn income for the institution, to enhance state economic development
(small companies in particular stand to reap great profits), and to commercialize
research results for the public benefit which cannot take place without
an industrial partner.
Trends were addressed from the perspective of the university, industry,
and the federal government. From the university standpoint, the trends are
only good, and getting better. To highlight just one of the many latest
statistics (for fiscal year 1996) compiled by the Association of University
Technology Managers for their annual Licensing Survey, the 173 participating
U.S. and Canadian institutions earned revenues of $592 million--up 19.6%
from 1995.
From the industry perspective, university partners share risk and help relieve
the pressure on the bottom line--profits. Outsourcing research and development
(R&D) to the university means creating a pipeline to the newest cutting
edge technology.
"Policy schizophrenia" forms part of the government perspective, as it strives
to balance the major goals of job creation and economic development against
the principle that ". . . no one-- industry OR the university--should get
rich . . ." achieving those goals.
With the Office of Technology Alliances at the core of UCI's partnerships,
mediating that delicate balance between economic development and potential
industry/university conflicts of interest, UCI's highly successful, cyclical
model of collaboration provides a win-win strategy for industry/university
partnering. In return for salary, facilities use, and royalty shares, the
principal investigator--the inventor--turns over licensing rights to the
university. The university, in turn, assigns the commercial rights to the
industry sponsor/licensee in return for revenues from fees and royalties,
and funding for overhead. The sponsor/licensee gains "new knowledge/diligence"
from the principal investigator.
The library--its services and collections--enters the partnership as another
key resource provider. Its contributions take such forms as repository and
service provider for patents and other primary, along with secondary, intellectual
property information resources; gateway to data profiling faculty, research
centers, institutes, and companies; provider of pharmaceutical information;
and more. Through the development of Web metasites delivered to desktops,
the library can provide an ideal form of one-stop shopping services for
the university and its industry partners.
Michael Oppenheim
Rosenfeld Library, UCLA
Annual
Conference Highlights