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Volume 1, Issue 3 |
By Tresa Niedfeldt, Financial and Information Specialist, KSURF and Gary Rabold, Vice President, Technology Transfer, MACC
There are various data sources available to use for technology transfer benchmarking purposes. Federal agencies provide summaries of research funding and expenditures, as do many states. Probably the single most comprehensive source of statistics on university technology transfer activities and results is the Annual Licensing Survey compiled by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). This annual survey summarizes data from the roughly 175 U.S. and Canadian research universities that are AUTM members.
The brief glimpse provided in this article is taken from the latest AUTM annual report (1997), and spans the period 1995 - 1997. Because research funding among the reporting universities varies by more than an order of magnitude (a few tens of millions of dollars to several hundred million dollars), we have chosen to normalize our analyses using each institution's respective annual research expenditures as the base.
As one might imagine, not all institutions reporting to AUTM organize
their research and technology transfer numbers
similarly. This results in some inconsistencies in the survey
results. Of particular note is the "Sponsored Research Expenditures"
(SRE) category in the AUTM survey. AUTM requests that the universities
report those annual research expenditures only for research activities
that are likely to result in licensable inventions. This puts some
subjectivity into the process and depending on how the institutions compile
and select from their information, there is a certain amount of over- or
under-reporting. For these reasons, the benchmarking numbers are
good qualitative indicators, but are not
quantitatively accurate.
The AUTM survey includes data for the following categories:
For this article we include only the SREs as a relative capacity measure, and the normalized Licensing Revenue and Legal Reimbursements as a measure of effectiveness.
We have evaluated Kansas State University vs. its peer group, including
Oregon State University, Colorado State University, Iowa State University,
and North Carolina State University-Raleigh. (No data was available
for Oklahoma State University.)
Other selected Big XII institutions including Texas A&M, the University
of Colorado, the University of Missouri-Columbia, and the University of
Kansas.Other institutions with similar sized research programs (according
to the AUTM surveys) including Montana State University, Mississippi State
University, North Dakota State University, Syracuse University, and the
New Jersey Institute of Technology.
The figures below show 3-year averages for SRE and licensing return
on SRE for the Regents' Peer Group per AUTM data.
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Although KSU appears at the low end of the spectrum for relevant research funding, it appears above the average for licensing returns, as a percent of SRE. In fact, KSU fares well in each of the categories outlined above, and against each of the three comparison groups. This is the kind of performance that keeps KSU "in the ball game" and positions us to hit the "home run" that can return large absolute dollars to KSU for reinvestment in its research programs.
