More 'Bang' for the Research Bucks

Some of the results from a recent Commerce Department meeting with university officials, it seems likely that research campuses will be doing a lot of planning soon, if they are not already, around improving the institution's long tail revenue growth and economic impact resulting from commercial applications of campus-based research. And work also needs to be done on ways of measuring more than just revenue dollars as a gauge of the impact of research. From Goldie Blumenstyk at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"We're probably not maximizing the output," said Lee T. Todd Jr, president of the University of Kentucky. (He noted that Kentucky is now using a grant to pay two employees to work as "harvesters" of new invention ideas by scouring university labs for ideas that might have commercial potential.)

Mr. Todd and others said it was also important to develop new ways of measuring the effectiveness of commercialization, to include factors like how many new jobs are created and how much investment do the ideas draw. "They're trackable," he said. Organizations like the Association of University Technology Managers track gauges like patents awarded and licenses issued, but don't go so far as to try to assess job creation. A number of other organizations have recently begun to look at those broader approaches.

---

Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA