The management of industrial applications of inventions in two californian universities

There is a great deal of discussion about the way in which American universities generate revenue from their intellectual property, especially in the context of the legislation outlined in the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act. It is less widely known that the university offices who are responsible for this do not always cover their costs in paying the salaries of their permanent staff. This is not true of the Stanford office nor the University of California-San Francisco office. A short distance separates these two famous West-coast institutions. Stanford is private and UCSF is public. Both these universities were able to transfer by license a large number of their inventions to industry and to distribute the resulting revenues both to the university and to the local economy.