U.S. research universities churn out over 60% of our nation’s basic, game-changing research. In this era of tight budgets, some universities are offshoring the work involved in bringing on-campus inventions to market, paying companies in India to do market research and low level legal work such as patent prior art searches. It’s counter-intuitive, but could offshoring the commercialization process of university inventions help bust out some of the un-used backlog of innovative university technologies, and actually *help* our universities create domestic, high-value jobs?
Offshoring remains a taboo subject in our faltering economy, but it may not be as simple as we have been led to believe. I share the same reservations about offshoring work that any American does — after all, I live in upstate New York, the land of decaying manufacturing cities. However, strange as it may seem, universities that offshore knowledge work such as patent analysis and market research reports report a significant increase in new invention disclosures and happier faculty inventors. It goes against what most of us believe, but there’s increasing evidence that offshored jobs do not decrease the number of domestic jobs. In fact, recent research concludes that “an increase in offshoring pushes the average task performed by [U.S] natives toward higher cognitive and non-routine content.” (1)
To read the full, original article click on this link: Why offshoring some tech transfer functions could help create U.S. jobs « Triple Helix Innovation
