The shift to private R&D investment may curtail innovation
A new study makes the case that as funding for university research shifts from government to private firms, entrepreneurship suffers.
Why it matters: The share of research funding to universities from the federal government has declined as private companies make up a bigger proportion of R&D spending. Far from encouraging the development of new companies, the shift may be slowing the pace of valuable innovation.
What’s happening: In a new working paper, researchers led by Tania Babina of Columbia Business School compared research grants, patent filings and U.S. Census Bureau data to identify the effects that changes in the sources of university research funding had on academic scientists.
What they’re saying: “If you get more private funding, it creates intellectual property that companies can appropriate through patents,” says Elisabeth Ruth Perlman of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, one of the paper’s co-authors.
By the numbers: Since 2000, federal funding as a percentage of university R&D has fallen from 60% to below 45%, while corporate funding has risen from 20% to 30%.
Flashback: The paper cites the example of a company born in the late 1990s through research funded in part by the federal government, which left its founders free to commercialize their innovations.