National Survey of Research Commercialisation - Australian ...

3. COUNTRY COMPARISONS
INTRODUCTION
The National Survey of Research Commercialisation generated information about the
extent of research commercialisation activity occurring in universities, medical research
institutes and CSIRO in Australia.
An analysis was undertaken to compare that information with information about
commercial activities occurring in similar institutions in the USA and Canada. Data
from CSIRO were excluded from this analysis.
The data presented in Section 2 of this report were collected using a questionnaire
that was based on the questionnaire used in the Association of University Technology
Managers (AUTM) Licensing Survey of technology licensing and related performance for
US and Canadian academic and non-profit institutions and patent management firms.
This was to enable Year 2000 data collected from Australian institutions in the National
Survey of Research Commercialisation to be compared directly with that for US and
Canadian institutions collected in the AUTM Licensing Survey: Fiscal Year 2000.
For the purposes of this comparative analysis, data for Australia comprised that
from all universities and medical research institutes that responded to the National
Survey of Research Commercialisation. Data for the USA and Canada comprised
that for all institutions that responded to the AUTM Licensing Survey: Fiscal
Year 2000 — a list of respondent institutions can be found in the full report for
that survey (Association of University Technology Managers, 2002).
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.
Country comparisons were made on the basis of ratios of each of these indicators to
research expenditure, as a way of adjusting absolute levels of commercialisation activity
in these four areas in the three countries relative to the magnitude of expenditures on
research in those countries.
For each country, research expenditure was the sum of the research expenditures of
institutions in that country that responded to the relevant survey.
For each country, research expenditure expressed in local currency was converted to US
dollars by dividing that expenditure by the purchasing power parities (PPPs) developed
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