A century after a New York banker donated $100,000 to help establish what would become the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, his hometown is reaping the benefits of his generosity. Last month the Technion, Israel's oldest university, and Cornell University won a closely watched competition to build an applied-sciences campus in New York…

Universities and their inventors earned more than $1.8-billion from commercializing their academic research in the 2011 fiscal year, collecting royalties from new breeds of wheat, from a new drug for the treatment of HIV, and from longstanding arrangements over enduring products like Gatorade. Northwestern University earned the most of any…

College campuses are hothouses of data, including course schedules, degree requirements, and grades. But much of the information remains spread out across software systems or locked on university servers. Start-up companies want to pry the information loose from campus servers in order to offer personalized services that could transform the…

Sarah L. Kieweg had her own nice surprise when the University of Central Florida contacted her. She understood quite a bit about her father's pioneering work on artificial intelligence in the 1990s. Still, in 2006, eight years after he died of a heart attack, at age 50, the call from the university came out of the blue: some of James R. Driscoll's…

This article reports on a conflict between the inventor of a medicine for dry eyes and the university where she worked, which highlights the pitfalls in commercialization of academic discoveries. Renee L. Kaswan, the former professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Georgia has been prodding the institution to be more aggressive in…

This article reports that despite the doubts about education financing, Israel's innovative companies spun off by universities show no signs of slowing down, as new drugs and other discoveries have produced huge incomes. Thirty years ago, two researchers at Hebrew University set about to make a better tomato. One that was firmer, stayed fresher…

U.S. universities collected more than $641 million from royalties on their inventions in the 1999 fiscal year, and they filed for 7,612 patents. Findings from a survey by the Association of University Technology Managers show licensing revenues, patent activity, and income from technology developments of U.S. higher education institutions. (SLD)

Uses the University of Michigan and three other colleges (University of Maryland--Baltimore County, Brigham Young University, and Washington University) to illustrate the varied approaches to capitalizing financially on campus research by deciding what constitutes success. Includes a "tech-transfer scorecard" listing the highest-ranking…

While some universities have had success establishing venture funds to market research with commercial potential, Cornell University has formed an alumni panel to evaluate new university technologies for those with promise for new products, spin-off companies, and profits. Members with connections in venture capital will arrange financing and…

Members of Congress charge that some universities are selling the results of federally financed research to foreign companies while they argue for more research money to increase American competitiveness in world markets. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology program is criticized for impropriety in sharing information too freely. (MSE)

Royalties paid to universities in 1995 increased 12% over the previous year. The increase is attributed in part to federal legislation allowing institutions to patent inventions and discoveries resulting from federally-funded research. Data are based on a survey of 127 universities holding 4,272 licenses generating royalties. Licensing income and…

Royalty revenues earned in 1990 by 21 of the nation's largest research institutions on researchers' patented discoveries were 28 percent higher than in 1989, and the trend is expected to continue. The jump reflects growing activity in patenting and licensing professors' inventions in recent technology-transfer programs. (MSE)

The excitement and intense competition surrounding the search for new applications of superconductors resembles the entrepreneurial atmosphere of the early 1970s, when faculty were launching profitable companies based on developments in biotechnology and semiconductors. (MSE)

Increased university efforts to help faculty members transfer the results of their research from the laboratory to the marketplace are posing ethical dilemmas for both institutions and scholars. Stanford's Office of Technology Licensing is cited, as are biotechnology developments, and secrecy and competitiveness issues. (LB)

In search of increased support for graduate students in plant science and upgraded laboratories, the College of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California Berkeley, offered the college's expertise in exchange for major financial backing from the single company making the best offer. The resulting five-year, $25-million alliance with one…