The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 enabled U.S. universities to patent inventions developed through federally funded research programs. This provided an opportunity for academia to develop technologies from the research conducted by faculty. Over 25 years have passed and 39,671 patents have been granted to academic inventors. Unfortunately, this accounts for less than two percent of the total patents awarded in the U.S. during this time. To address this concern, the research presented here investigates the academic technology development process to determine factors that are critical to shaping ideas towards creating patentable technologies. While past research has been corporate-focused and conducted from the managerial perspective; this research examined the process from the inventor perspective and from the technology transfer office through two investigations that utilized a common framework.
Study One, focused in the area of Radio Frequency Identification, explored the process from idea generation to protection of 11 successful patent inventors. The inventors created concept maps describing their development process. Five investigations were conducted on the maps: three quantitative and two qualitative. The participating corporate inventors focused more on financial issues and in regards to challenges found strategic issues to be more problematic and societal aspects to be more time-consuming and problematic than did the academic inventors. Part II of Study One involved an inventor questionnaire based on the information gathered in Part I. Unfortunately, the response rate was ineffectively poor resulting in inconclusive data. Study Two identified the critical duties being performed by technology transfer offices (TTOs). One qualitative and two quantitative analyses were conducted on the data collected from a TTO licensing manager survey. Analyses from this study provided insight on elements that influence TTO success factors.
From these two studies, a model for academic technology development was created. If new and existing TTOs can facilitate academic inventors with respect to the elements identified in this model, the possibility exists to further stimulate the quality and quantity of the number of patents arising from academia.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-07232007-190356 |
| Date | 25 September 2007 |
| Creators | Golish, Bradley Lawrence |
| Contributors | Mary Besterfield-Sacre, Michael Lovell, Larry Shuman, Marlin Mickle, Kim Needy |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-07232007-190356/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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