National Survey of Research Commercialisation - Australian ...

Inventor involvement in licensing
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Inventor involvement appears to be an important element of strategies employed by
universities, medical research institutes and CSIRO to manage their commercial licensing
activities:
In 73% of cases, inventors were either extremely involved or very involved in licensing
activities.
In only 5% of cases were inventors uninvolved in licensing activities.
Start-up companies
In total, 47 new start-up companies were formed in Year 2000 as a result of research
conducted within the respondent institutions — of these, 91% had their headquarters
in Australia.
Of the 102 start-up companies that were reported to have been formed at any time
as the result of research conducted within the respondent institutions, 101 were still
operational at the end of Year 2000.
Respondent institutions held equity in 63% of their start-up companies at the end of
Year 2000.
COUNTRY COMPARISONS
The National Survey of Research Commercialisation generated information about the
extent of research commercialisation activity occurring in universities and medical
research institutes in Australia.
An analysis was undertaken to compare that information with information about
commercial activities occurring in similar institutions in the USA and Canada.
The indicators that were used to undertake the country comparisons were:
number of US patents issued in Year 2000;
number of licences executed in Year 2000;
amount of adjusted gross income from licences in Year 2000; and
number of start-up companies that were formed in Year 2000.
Comparisons were made on the basis of ratios that express the value of each of these
indicators relative to research expenditure and to gross domestic product (GDP),
respectively.
All financial amounts used in the calculation of these ratios are expressed in US$, on
the basis of adjustments that were made to ensure purchasing power parity between
amounts for the three countries.
The amounts of GDP were also adjusted to account for differences in response rates
of institutions in the three countries. This was not necessary in the case of research
expenditure, since the expenditure used in the calculation of ratios for the comparisons
was only that of the respondent institutions in the three countries.
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