In asking the university to become more commercial in its orientation, we must not kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
Since passage of the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980, which encouraged universities to patent federally funded inventions, university-industry collaborations have exploded. Universities operate their own venture capital firms to finance start-up companies, hold equity in professors' companies and seek to generate royalty income from their faculty's research -- all of which has brought commercial imperatives directly into the heart of academic life as never before.
