I Helped Stanford Researchers Launch Google: This Is What I Learned

Over 27 years as executive director of Stanford University's Office of Technology Licensing, I witnessed countless ideas with the potential to change the world. Many have done just that, to the great benefit of both the university and society at large. But even within academia, the role of technology-licensing offices isn't well known.

Our role was to help turn major breakthroughs from campus laboratories into usable products for consumers. Not every promising discovery is successfully commercialized, but many that are have a dramatic impact. At Stanford, I had the honor of shepherding recombinant DNA and later the Google algorithm into widespread use.

Technology transfer offices also bring benefits directly to universities. By licensing academic innovations to companies, universities generate new funding for research and development, allowing scientists to conduct even more groundbreaking work. It's a virtuous circle.

The Birth of Technology Transfer: The Bayh-Dole Act

This system didn't come about by accident. It relies on the dedication and creativity of tech transfer offices, as well as on the laws governing what they're allowed to do.

Even the most revolutionary ideas have humble beginnings in academic research, with professors experimenting in labs or grad students pulling all-nighters in front of computers. At the Office of Technology Licensing at Stanford, inventors would come to us saying, "I think I've got something here."

When we came across a promising invention, we registered a patent, protecting the schools' and the inventors' intellectual property rights. Then, for some of those patented inventions, we sought out companies interested in licensing the technology. A new discovery is never consumer-ready right out of the gate. It can take many more years and massive investment, which only the private sector is equipped to provide. This is how such products as Honeycrisp apples, high-definition television, the allergy medicine Allegra, airport scanners, and numerous life-saving vaccines have arrived on the scene.

This process wasn't always legally possible. When I began working at Stanford as a licensing associate in 1981, Congress had just passed a law called the Bayh-Dole Act. Prior to then, the federal government owned the patent rights to any inventions that had ever received federal funding -- which includes most work coming out of academia. But the government seldom developed these breakthroughs any further. Most of the patents were simply filed away, wasting the time, money, and talent that had gone into them. Of the 28,000 patents held by federal agencies at the time Bayh-Dole passed, less than 5% had been licensed for commercialization.

Bayh-Dole allowed universities that received federal research funds to keep their intellectual property, a simple-sounding reform with a huge impact. We knew this gave us an enormous opportunity to turn academic innovations into real-world products -- not just to maximize profit but to benefit the public. But we had no road map for how to go about it.

Case Study: The Cohen-Boyer Patent and Non-Exclusive Licensing

Our model took shape in those early days when Stanford Professor Stanley Cohen and University of California, San Francisco Professor Herbert Boyer came to us with a stunning development: they could merge and clone segments of DNA, a process that would become known as recombinant DNA. Led by founder Niels Reimers, the Office of Technology Licensing decided to license the technology non-exclusively to any interested companies at a reasonable price.

The invention sparked the modern biotech industry. The Cohen-Boyer patent has been licensed to over 440 companies and is the basis of more than 2,400 transformative products, including a hepatitis B vaccine, an HIV test, and synthetic insulin.

Initially, one company approached Stanford seeking an exclusive license for the discovery, which would have prevented competing firms from licensing the patent for their own research. In some cases, exclusive licenses are perfectly appropriate, even desirable. But in the case of the Cohen-Boyer patent, the Office of Technology Licensing determined that non-exclusive rights were ideal, since they fostered partnerships between licensor and licensees, encouraging further collaboration between academia and industry. This seemingly simple decision enabled us to have a much greater societal impact than we otherwise might have.

Eventually, we realized that our success stories could be used to teach other universities how to translate their own scientists' research into beneficial consumer goods. So, our office led the effort to codify a set of principles for technology transfer in a document called "In the Public Interest: Nine Points to Consider in Licensing University Technology." Since it was published in 2007, more than 120 institutions have adopted the principles, using them as a guide for their own tech transfer offices. Today, most research universities have technology transfer offices.
 
That said, there's no quick formula for success. The passage of Bayh-Dole was a crucial starting point, but ultimately the tech-transfer process requires resourcefulness, hard work, and a willingness to take chances.

The Impact of Technology Transfer on Universities and Society

In the mid-1990s, two graduate students approached us with a novel web-search algorithm, developed with the help of a National Science Foundation grant. We patented it, but no business wanted to license it, so we licensed the rights to the students themselves. Their intellectual property now protected from encroachment, Larry Page and Sergey Brin went on to launch Google.

During my decades at the Office of Technology Licensing, thanks to that algorithm and hundreds of other licensed inventions, we have been able to direct additional resources to cutting-edge research across various high-impact fields. Since then, I've worked in the private sector. I advise the clients of the law firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati on tech licensing from universities, which lets me continue to help introduce new inventions into people's lives.

In both my current and earlier roles, I've witnessed how central a tech transfer office can be to helping a university further its mission. Academics do tremendous work conducting basic science, discovering the fundamental physical realities of our world. But by transferring some of those discoveries to outside developers, universities can also do more. They can fund more research, and make sure that those breakthroughs go on to benefit society at large.