DAVIS -- University bureaucracies stifle research when they focus more on generating revenue than in fulfilling a public obligation to improve human health and the environment.

“That’s a growing viewpoint of many interested in the technology transfer field,” said University of California, Davis entomologist Bruce Hammock, who served as the prelinary speaker at the recent National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) conference at the Berry Hill Plantation, South Boston, Va.

The two-day conference addressed a deepening concern among the multiple National Institutes of Health and the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences: how to translate basic research effectively to improve human health and the environment.

The academic culture is “wonderful for innovation and training, but university bureaucracies are incompatible with translation,” said Hammock, a distinguished professor of entomology who directs the UC Davis Superfund Basic Research Program of NIEHS.

Speaking on “Universities' Focus on Revenue Generation in Licensing Stifles Innovation: The Case to Modify the Bayh-Doles Act,” Hammock said that “We as a nation have developed the most powerful innovation factory in human history but universities are poor at moving public sector innovation into the private sector for development and implementation.”

The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, co-authored by Sens. Birch Bayh (D-Indiana) and Sen. Robert Dole (R-Kansas), turned over the licenses for federally funded research projects to universities, but “an unintended consequence of this act was the generation of university technology transfer offices or TTOs,” Hammock said.

The Kauffman Foundation, which Hammock described as “the largest entrepreunal ‘think tank’ in the United States,” issued a report in April that said TTOs “have become gatekeepers” and “that in many cases, constrain the flow of inventions and frustrate faculty, entrepreneurs and industries.”

The Kauffman Foundation report said the Bayh-Dole Act was intended “to speed up the process of moving technologies from the laboratory to the marketplace by clearing the way for universities to claim legal and, therefore, financial rights to federal government-funded innovations developed by their faculty. However, new layers of administration developed that centralized the process, narrowed the view of innovation as only patents, and emphasized revenue generation rather than volume of innovations the university commercializes.”

Expanding on ideas expressed by the Kauffman Foundation and the American Chemical Society, Hammock told the scientific conference that “universities have great difficulty in determining the value of their own technologies due, in part, to the diversity of technologies developed. There is often a degree of arrogance among TTOs, resulting in hesitancy to solicit advice on establishing the value of a technology. As a result, they overlook important early state technology from young faculty while searching for ‘home run’ technologies from established investigators. Because TTOs are afraid of making bad decisions, the flow of the technology from the university is drastically delayed.”

“Having failed to patent innovative technologies from young faculty, universities tend to spend far too much on the technology they do patent--trying to substitute very expensive language for research,” Hammock said. “This can result in a technology burdened with such expensive patents that it effectively has been priced out of the market.”

The UC Davis professor said a possible solution, suggested by the Kauffman Foundation, is for universities to move from the short-term profit model to a volume model where many technologies are patented at low cost and licensed rapidly.

Many of the Kauffman Foundation’s suggestions “are in line with the objectives for technology transfer outlined by UC President Dynes,” Hammock said, “but his vision has not filtered down to the TTOs.”

At the NIEHS conference, scientists and administrators discussed several alternate models for research translation. Hammock credited two UC Davis faculty members with originating many of the ideas that he presented at the meeting: Martin Kenney, Department of Human and Community Development, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and Andrew Hargadon of the Graduate School of Management who directs both the Technology Management Programs and the Center for Entrepreneurship.

Kenney, a member of various national academies involving research and development (R&D) and globalization, spoke Oct. 4 at a congressional subcommittee in Washington, D.C., on the criteria firms use for locating their R&D firms in a globalizing world; he addresed the Subcommittee on Technology and Innovation, Committee on Science and Technology, U.S. House of Representatives.

Hargadon, an expert in technology management, management of innovation, entrepreneurship and new product development, focuses his research on the point at which technology and innovation meet and the interplay between product development and marketing. He looks at the sources of new ideas and the notion of “knowledge brokering.”

The mission of NIEHS (www.niehs.nih.gov) is “to reduce the burden of human illness and disability by understanding how the environment influences the development and progression of human disease.” As a publicly funded institute, the NIEHS says it is committed to conducting “the most rigorous research in environmental health sciences, and to communicating the results of this research to the public.”

The Kauffman Foundation report is at http://www.chemicalanalysis.com/news.php?item.63.