آیا اقدامات Bayh-Dole موجب توافقات تحقیقات بنیادی می شود؟

We examine three hypotheses regarding the effects of the Bayh-Dole Act on research effort of faculty. The first hypothesis we call the status quo hypothesis and it asserts that there has been no effect on research profiles. The second hypothesis, which we call the negative hypothesis, asserts that faculty have been diverted from their traditional role in basic research toward research with more commercial potential. Our final hypothesis is derived from prior theoretical work that suggests that both basic and applied research is greater when faculty can benefit from commercialization of their research effort; we refer to this as the positive hypothesis. The data we examine are the research and invention disclosure of faculty at 8 US universities over the period 1983–1999. Using a citation based measure of basic research publications we relate basic research effort to invention disclosures. Our findings are clear in that they do not show any support for the negative hypothesis and they show substantially greater support for the positive hypothesis than for the status quo hypothesis.

With the passage of the Bayh Dole Act in 1980, universities were allowed to retain property rights to the results of federally funded research conducted by their employees and to exclusively license the results in return for royalties. The Act was passed amid concerns that while the United States led other countries in basic research, the results were languishing in university labs since firms had little incentive to develop inventions because they could not appropriate the returns.2 The premise was that exclusivity would provide the needed incentives for firms to license. Moreover, the royalty payments would provide incentives for universities to market the inventions and faculty to disclose them.

In this paper we have considered the possibility that the Bayh-Dole Act, by providing returns to faculty for commercializing their inventions, has diverted faculty away from their traditional role of basic research. Most observers would argue that, if true, this is detrimental to the US research enterprise. In considering this possibility we have gone beyond the typical arguments that the Bayh-Dole Act has had no effects on the research enterprise (the status quo hypothesis) or that it has had a detrimental effect (the negative hypothesis) to add the possibility that the effects have been positive in that they might have increased basic research effort (along with an increase in applied effort). The positive hypothesis was based on earlier theoretical work that compared simulations of university research in which faculty cannot license their inventions to simulations of university research in which licensing income is possible (Thursby et al., 2007). The simulations show that the typical effect is an increase in both basic and applied research (though applied research increases to a greater extent).