Posts Tagged: "Brookings Institute"

A few months ago, a judge ordered Apple to pay the University of Wisconsin $506 million for infringing one of its tech patents. Last year, Carnegie-Mellon University won $750 million in a patent infringement lawsuit against Marvell Technology Group. With such big-money patent cases in the news, you might think that owning a patent can create a major windfall of profit for universities. While this has proven true for a handful of institutions, the truth is that most universities actually make little or no money from licensing the inventions they produce.  

The number of U.S. patents granted for clean energy technology has recently dropped following a near 10-year period of growth. In fact, according to the Brookings Institute, the number of CleanTech patents granted in the country fell by a whopping nine percent between 2014 and 2016. When the economy picks up and things shift again, energy patents should be able to move forward, but for now, the uncertainty with the current Trump administration has brought things to a complete standstill.

As of late, the spike of clean energy technology innovation is slowing down in the United States, during a time that the Trump administration is aiming to drastically cut government research spending in the industry… The slump in clean energy patents is a direct result of the downturn in oil and gas prices, according to Morico. “When oil was trading at over $100 per barrel just before the crash in 2014, there was a lot of investment going into renewable/clean energy. After the prices of oil crashed, investors started cutting back their investments in renewable/clean energy because the costs of many of these technologies couldn’t compete with low oil and gas prices,” he explained.

Google, now Alphabet Inc., is one of the world’s most valuable companies but employs only a tenth of the number of workers of past giants of industry like AT&T and General Motors did about a half century ago. But we need to point out some obvious problems with the theory that technological innovation is dealing irreparable harm to the American workforce. Simply stated, you cannot ignore the reality that technological innovation is a net creator of jobs, from those who create the innovation, to those who market and sell the innovations, to those who install and maintain the innovations. Focusing only on the low income workers who will be displaced by robotics, for example, creates an inaccurate picture that significantly distorts the workplace realities. Further, it is those innovation based jobs that are the high paying jobs that our economy most wants and which will pay livable wages.

The nature of broadband has been changing in a way that Wheeler believes will spur even more robust data services in the near future. The FCC is taking a number of steps to try and promote competition among broadband service providers, one of the most highly anticipated of which is the incentive auction of broadcast television airwave spectrum which is currently scheduled for the first quarter of 2016. The auction is an attempt to purchase spectrum from TV broadcasters so that it can be resold in a later auction to wireless service providers.

She then pivoted to address the other side of the issue, which relates to issuing patents that should never have been issued in the first place. Lee explained: “I’ve see the effect of patents that should not have issued, or that have issued with a scope that is too broad. There is a also a cost associated with that as well… On average a start-up may get between $10 to $15 million to last over a number of years, and there are statistics that indicate that patent litigation can cost cost well over $1 million. So you can see if there is abusive litigation or a patent that should not have issued, there is a cost to our businesses.”

In order for mobile technology to provide the data and services that rural communities need, a wireless spectrum for commercial use must be put in place. Issues regarding wireless spectrum came up a few times throughout the first panel, both from questioner Brooks Boliek of Politico as well as from audience questions. Bold, a representative of Qualcomm, declined to speak about the American wireless spectrum auction administered by the U.S. Federal Commission, which began in the middle of November. However, he did state that countries taking a stand to free up more spectrum for commercial use were the ones showing the most economic gains from mobile technology. “Spectrum is the real estate that [the mobile tech] industry is built on,” Bold said. “The countries that make the tough decision to free up spectrum, those are the countries that get the investment… and the ones that, quite frankly, are doing better.”

Patent licensing or creating new companies is not a get rich quick path for schools despite the occasional blockbuster invention or Google spin-out. Indeed, enriching universities is not the goal of the Bayh-Dole Act which spurred the rapid growth of TTO’s. Still, every state now sees its research universities as key parts of their economic development strategy shows that it’s not just the traditionally dominant R&D universities that are making significant contributions under Bayh-Dole… AUTM estimates the impact from sales of products based on licensed academic research in 2012 totaled $80 billion dollars – that’s double the entire federal investment in university research. Another study found that university patent licensing supported 3 million jobs between 1996-2010 (that’s an average of 200,000 jobs per year).