Educational institutions have always been central to American visions of democracy and the public good: the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 declared that “knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged”; and George Washington's inaugural address to Congress in 1790 recommended the founding of a national university. The American conception of academic excellence had a strong pragmatic component, as exemplified by many of the “public Ivies” that were created through the Morrill Act of 1862. Such land grant universities were hardly ivory towers, but were designed as red-brick institutions that would contribute to advances in agriculture, industrial growth, and innovation. As such, the key question was not whether the promotion of education and social welfare was consistent with ties to industry, but the extent and nature of the collaboration.

This book is concerned with one type of collaboration: the transfer of technology between universities and industry. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 was designed to facilitate patenting and commercialization of innovations by universities, and the growth in academic patenting and licensing that has since occurred has commonly been attributed to its effects. The Economist (14 December 2002) goes further and argues that it was “possibly the most inspired piece of legislation to be enacted in America over the past half-century,” and even “helped to reverse America's precipitous slide into industrial irrelevance.” The authors refute such grandiose claims after a careful examination of the quantitative evidence and several case studies.

The volume comprises an array of articles produced over the past decade. As a result, the evidence is not presented in an entirely seamless fashion: for instance, the data in the chapter that deals with the period up to 1980 are not fully comparable with the information presented in the chapter that deals with the aftermath of Bayh-Dole. However, the introduction and conclusion are extremely effective in setting out and recapitulating the main themes from the essays, and each chapter concludes with a useful summary statement. The first three chapters of the book survey historical developments in the twentieth century. Economic and legal historians of the nineteenth century have documented the details of changes in the academic backgrounds of inventors and in work for hire doctrines that affirm the authors' conclusions regarding the existence of academic-industry links long before the Bayh-Dole Act. The fields of electricity and mechanical engineering illustrate early connections to industry, such as MIT faculty and graduates who engaged in consultancies, or formed enterprises to commercialize their discoveries. More recently, pioneers in computer and medical science have likewise been drawn from American universities. The federal government financed 24 percent of academic research in 1935 and 70 percent in 1970, with the expectation that universities would produce findings that yielded practical benefits, especially for national defense and biomedical science. University patenting was debated early in the twentieth century, although policies were not well articulated prior to the 1940s. Many institutions outsourced patent management to the Research Corporation (founded in 1912), and until after the 1960s chose not to administer patent portfolios themselves.

Subsequent chapters discuss the political rationale for the Bayh-Dole legislation, and empirically assess its effects. After an analysis of the patent and licensing data for three leading research universities (UC, Stanford, and Columbia), the authors consider the role of entry and experience in the patterns of patenting for a larger sample of academic institutions. They find little evidence that Bayh-Dole triggered changes in the culture of patenting for experienced universities. Institutions that began patenting after 1980 were initially likely to receive less important patents but over time benefited from a generalized learning process that enabled them to produce more valued inventions. The book's overall conclusion is that the Bayh-Dole Act did not significantly alter the commercial orientation of academic institutions and, in the absence of the legislation, their patenting and licensing would still have increased. Higher rates of patenting and commercialization owed to separate factors including the overall strengthening of patent rights and growth in a few patent-intensive fields such as biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. Five case studies are used to highlight the complexity of university-industry technology transfer. A large part of the interaction between university researchers and corporations is “social” in the sense of research collaborations, the diffusion of knowledge through publications and conferences, and job mobility, as opposed to “economic” licensing or sales of property rights in ideas. The authors conclude by expressing concern about the current extension of property rights to areas formerly considered part of the public domain such as basic materials and research tools, and the need for licensing policies that pursue more encompassing social goals than narrow profit maximization.

The book would have benefited from a more detailed examination of the factors beyond Bayh-Dole that influenced collaborations between universities and industry, including the National Cooperative Research Act of 1984 which encouraged research consortia among academic and industrial researchers. However, the authors raise important issues and make a key contribution to the debate about the role of universities in society. Their monograph deserves close attention from policy makers, students of technological change, and ivory tower scholars alike.