Great guest post on Techcrunch today by Vivek Wadhwa about the amount of university research that languishes on shelves in labs:

“In 2007, U.S. universities performed $48.8 billion of research and filed 17,589 U.S. patent applications. In that same year universities received back revenues for licensing and royalties on patents of less than $2 billion. Those revenues include ongoing royalties from all of the research licensed over the past 40 years. The implication is clear. An astonishing amount of promising research is left in the lab.”

Look at those numbers! As I note in my comment on that blog this represents an entrepreneurial opportunity:

” So here’s my take: Why not band together a few entrepreneurs and marketing people (like me) with start-up experience and start a for-profit company that contracts with university research departments to assess their portfolios and choose inventions to bring to market? I’d be in.
Most research universities have tech transfer departments but they are notoriously bad at bringing things to market. Scientists don’t trust marketing people, academics compete for things that make no sense to business people, etc. That’s why I suggest that a for-profit start-up that is independent of the research departments is the way to go.
So, let’s start one.”

We have a major research university here in Rochester, the University of Rochester. Their tech transfer department is better than many but they still run into the fact that university culture is seldom a good fit with entrepreneurial culture. This intrigues me…