The profits are impressive: the Association of University Technology Managers surveyed 132 universities and found that they earned a combined $576 million from patent royalties in 1998, a number that promises to keep rising dramatically (chart). Schools like Columbia University in New York have aggressively marketed their inventions to corporations, particularly pharmaceutical and high-tech companies.
Now Columbia is going retail–on the Web. It plans to go beyond the typical “dot.edu” model, free sites listing courses and professors’ research interests. Instead, it will offer the expertise of its faculty on a new for-profit site which will be spun off as an independent company. The site will provide free access to educational and research content, say administrators, as well as advanced features that are already available to Columbia students, such as a simulation of the construction and architecture of a French cathedral and interactive 3-D models of organic chemicals. Free pages will feed into profit-generating areas, such as online courses and seminars, and related books and tapes. Columbia executive vice provost Michael Crow imagines “millions of visitors” to the new site, including retirees and students willing to pay to tap into this educational resource. “We can offer the best of what’s thought and written and researched,” says Ann Kirschner, who heads the project. Columbia also is anxious not be aced out by some of the other for- profit “knowledge sites,” such as About.com and Hungry Minds. “If they capture this space,” says Crow, “they’ll begin to cherry-pick our best faculty.”
Profits from the sale of patents typically have been divided between the researcher, the department and the university, and Web profits would work the same way, so many faculty members are delighted. But others find the trend worrisome: is a professor who stands to profit from his or her research as credible as one who doesn’t? Will universities provide more support to researchers working in profitable fields than to scholars toiling in more musty areas?
