Innovation - What can your government do for you?

On October 28, 2011 the White House reprised a 1987 Executive Order with a Presidential Memorandum  for “Accelerating Technology Transfer and Commercialization of Federal Research in Support of High Growth Businesses.”

President Obama challenges the executive departments and agencies that conduct R&D “to improve the results from its technology transfer and commercialization activities. The aim is to increase the successful outcomes of these activities over the next 5 years…” Core to this initiative is “fostering innovation” more broadly, as “innovation fuels economic growth.”

We explore this phenomenon, starting with Department of Commerce’s (published by NIST) “Annual Report on Technology Transfer: Approach and Plans, Fiscal Year 2009 Activities and Achievements” and recent trending – and expanding with our own analysis of patenting activity and R&D funding from governmental departments into American universities and colleges. This is not meant to be comprehensive nor does it include any definitive conclusions to be drawn from the data – this is simply a jumping-off point for further analysis and a suggestion into one small aspect of that analysis.

NIST Report on Tech Transfer

The 2009 NIST report  “details the results of technology partnering activities cultivated in the Department of Commerce’s Federal laboratories.” The reporting responsibility for NIST expands under the new Executive Order – “shall improve and expand, where appropriate, its collection of metrics in the Department of Commerce’s annual technology transfer summary report.” It will be interesting to see what new metrics and data are included in subsequent annual reports.

Some interesting metrics and trends from this report include:

• Number and type of “Collaborative Relationships for Research and Development” (CRADA)

• Invention Disclosure and Patenting

• Licensing Activity

CRADA’s ramped up significantly between 2005 and 2006 and have remained relatively consistent since then, with “traditional” CRADA’s trending 80, 149, 154, 131, and 77 for the years 2005-2009 respectively (downturn in 2009 is “attributed to successful conclusion of CRADA consortiums”). “Non-traditional” CRADAs jumped similarly from 2005 to 2006 and then settled on new plateau in 2007-2009 (1,826 in 2005; 2,895 in 2006; and an average around 2,350 for 2007-2009).

New invention disclosures and patent applications both trended upwards from 2005-2009, peaking at 40 (2008 and 2009) and 21 respectively (2008). “Patents issued” metric was 10 or less for all the years in the study.

Licensing activity shows a steep decline in 2007-2008, with over 100 departmental commercial licenses 2005-2007 and 29 in 2008 (and 40 in 2009). In terms of licenses bearing income, the numbers are relatively constant throughout the 5 years, with 27 patent licenses bearing income in 2009 (accounting for $335,889 in 2009).

Other metrics of Governmental Impact on Innovation

There are numerous ways to measure and track performance regarding innovation and tech transfer in the public sector. We took at look at the patent trends for these agencies, as well as their funding for research within universities and colleges to get a feel for the overall potential scope for impact – measuring the value of that impact is a whole separate discussion but perhaps is a key question that the White House and agencies must wrestle with, in particular as it pertains to transparency and accountability.

We looked at grants only for each department through September, 2011 and trended them over time and against several other parameters (most notably class). We also looked at funding from governmental agencies for R&D in American universities and colleges for 2009. We have already explored patenting activity at the institutional level and will continue to explore that in coming articles – it would certainly be interesting to be able to meaningfully connect to the dots between research funding and output (obviously patents are simply one slice of this equation).

We also explored how frequently patents were cited 20 (or 100) or more times by other patents – those metrics are shown in the table below as “c=>20” and “c=>100”. Given that there is an increased focus on tech transfer and commercialization, we looked very broadly at the patents to determine the number of occurrences of other assignees on these patents at publication (i.e., patent was granted to additional assignee(s) along with the governmental department). We’ll explore reassignments further in another paper.

TRENDS IN PATENTING ACTIVITY (and R&D funding for universities and colleges)

A few things stand out in this data – public sector patenting is certainly significant (approximately 50,000 patents to date and the 2010’s project out to over 8,000), but the trending certainly isn’t keeping up with the overall patent trending (significant acceleration). Key players seem to be DoD, Agriculture, HHS (NIH), and NASA, as well as Energy. In terms of total impact, HHS’s funding of R&D in universities and colleges of over $18 billion in 2009 is nearly twice the rest of department’s combined and the $27.6 billion is certainly substantial fuel for innovation in the institutional community (patenting and otherwise).

To give some additional flavor for the trending analysis, we have included some charting of the US Army’s patenting activity – patents by class for the last ~decade and patents granted per year from 1970 to-date.

We will continue to delve further into these metrics and trends as we roll out our governmental and institutional IP profiles and we will continue to report on important trends and analyses.