Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Universities have always been regarded as the purest places for academic research, discovery and dissemination of new subject knowledge, and student development and education. But today, technological invention and commercialization have become an important part of the development of more and more research universities.

In the United States, this model of technological invention and commercialization is known as "university technology transfer" and originated in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, it has experienced three development stages. WARF model of University of Wisconsin, third-party model of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and OTL (Office of Technology Licensing) model of Stanford University are representatives of three development stages respectively. Among them, OTL model has the best effect and becomes the most commonly adopted model at present.

Recently, Patterns, a journal owned by Cell Press, released the latest research report on Stanford University's Office of Technology Licensing (OTL). The report analyzed Stanford OTL's sales data of 4512 items from 6557 inventors during the 50 years from 1970 to 2020. By quantifying the overall trend of Stanford University's inventions, demographic and team composition analysis were conducted on inventors. Observe the impact of his invention on start-up licensing.

At the same time, the report also discloses the characteristics of invention language marketing, and the data shows that the length and type of marketing words of OTL will have a significant impact on the future revenue of invention. Here are the detailed results and analysis of this survey:

Overall trends: 4512 inventions marketed, only 20% profitable The study, conducted by Stanford OTL, looked at 4512 inventions marketed by 6557 inventors between 1970 and 2020. The data show that the number of inventions per year at Stanford OTL increased rapidly between 1980 (4 inventions per year) and 2010 (250 inventions per year), and gradually stabilized in 2010 (see Figure 1). This was largely influenced by the rise of the Internet, which saw growth soar as a result of mass marketing.

The OTL convention, which uses net income (defined as gross license income minus accumulated expenses) as a measure of invention output, results in total net income of $581 million for the years included, with an average net income of $13,000, most of which are negative, and statistics show that only 20% of inventions achieve positive net income (Figure A).

In terms of the classification of inventions, before 2000, the highest net income category was electronic products, and after 2000, it changed to biological and chemical products. Due to the accumulation of net income time, the net income of recent inventions is lower than that of old inventions due to less accumulation time.

The report counts the keywords with the highest log-likelihood ratios among inventions above the median (net income above the median in the same year) and inventions below the median (C), and vice versa (D). Among them, higher-income invention words are mostly related to life sciences, such as therapeutics, genomics, etc., while low-income invention words tend to be related to physical sciences, such as optics and photonics.

It is worth noting that when an invention belongs to multiple different fields, it can be assigned to multiple categories for statistics. Take the 17 medical imaging inventions disclosed in 2020 as an example, they can be assigned to the radiation subcategory (biological category) and the computer vision subcategory (engineering category) respectively.

As you can see, interdisciplinary research has been fruitful, and if you visualize the interactions between the different classes as a network (E), there is a lot of interaction between the biological and chemical subclasses, as well as the engineering and electronics subclasses.

Female inventors up nearly 20 percent

Figure 1: Demographics

A Percentage of female faculty and invention authors at Stanford University over the past 25 years

B Number of authors per invention by category

In terms of gender, the proportion of female inventors increased from 6.5% in 1995 to 19.7% in 2020 (Figure 1A). Despite this rapid growth, the proportion of female inventors is still far lower than the proportion of female faculty at Stanford University.

In addition, the size of the inventor team increases with time, with the average number of inventors per invention increasing from 2.47 in 1980-2000 to 3.29 in 2015-2020 (Figure 1B). This increase was consistent across categories and reflected the increased collaboration of Stanford's innovation environment.

▲ Figure 2: Self-licensing

A Proportion of inventions licensed by inventor startups over time

B Inventors license proportion of inventions in each net revenue group:

Sample size for each net income category is--

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