Patenting Public-Funded Research For Technology Transfer: A Conceptual-Empirical Synthesis of US Evidence and Lessons for India

The question of protecting intellectual property rights by academic inventors was never seriously contemplated until the introduction of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980 in the US. The Act allowed universities to retain patent rights over inventions arising out of federally-funded research and to license those patents exclusively or non-exclusively at their discretion. This particular legislation was a response to the growing concern over the fact that federally funded inventions in the US were not reaching the market place. In this paper a critical review of the US experience after the Bayh-Dole Act is presented and argues that the evidence is far from being unambiguous. [Working Paper No. 244]