Proving the Science: Opportunity Identification to Research Contract

Introduction

Much has been written about universities and technology transfer. Less has been written about universities and the processes for integration of knowledge between university specialties and the transfer of that integrated knowledge to parties outside the university. And, even less has been written about the issues in communication and contracting present when an inventor, from the community, seeks out a university in their quest to determine the commercial viability of their invention.

The term technology transfer gained prominence after the U.S. Congress passed of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. This Act and its subsequent amendments grant to the university the right to secure patents on discoveries made under federally funded research. The purpose of the law is to encourage the commercial application of research findings in pursuit of economic growth (Remington, 2005). Thus, the term technology transfer relates to discovery and invention from within the university. The term university entrepreneurship has also been linked to these concepts (Rotheraermel, Shanti et al, 2007).

Golish, Besterfield-Sacre and Shuman (2008) studied academic and corporate technology development processes and found there was little commonality among the elements in the concept maps of these two groups. The research also found that the elements missing from the concept maps of the academic inventors were related to market identification, cost evaluation, and changing customer needs/market requirements.

The passage of Bayh-Dole ushered into the university an awareness of opportunity to not only patent, license, and create new firms based on discoveries within the university, but also to collaborate with companies as a means for decimation of expertise in the university. However, around the globe, cultural differences between the university and corporations have been identified as providing obstacles to be overcome if this desire to transfer knowledge is to be fully realized (Valentín, 2000).

In both the above scenarios, invention within the university, and the transfer of knowledge through cross-collaboration between university faculty and corporations, the entities are sufficiently large to garner the attention of academic researchers. The same is not true in the case of the individual inventor. Where the popular press publishes numerous articles reporting the insights and activities of both corporate and independent inventors (Table 1), we were not successful at finding any academic research study linking an independent inventor to a research contract with a university – the subject of this case study.