Bob Dole’s 89th birthday on Sunday got me thinking about the significance of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 and the history (and future) of university-based innovation commercialization. My first job after law school was working as an aide to the Director of Policy of Bob Dole’s 1996 presidential campaign. It was in that position that I first heard about Bayh-Dole and the simple idea behind it: give universities, rather than the federal government, the intellectual property and commercialization rights that result from federal research funding.
The impact of this bipartisan legislation has been transformative for American innovation and economic progress over the three decades since its passage. At the time Bayh-Dole was enacted, the US government held over 28,000 patents, with less than 5% of those ever getting commercialized. Since then many thousands of new products and companies have been created based on university research, including numerous critical healthcare advances such as synthetic penicillin, the hepatitis B vaccine, and key therapies for cancer and Crohn’s disease.
