Turning Research into Inventions and Jobs

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He arrived at this theory after watching his graduate students eschew expertise gained in his lab, which specializes in the workings of so-called compact particle accelerators, to go into other technical fields. This pained Katsouleas because these tabletop-size accelerators had huge potential for medical uses. But launching a medical device company is a daunting prospect even for a seasoned entrepreneur, let alone a recent PhD recipient unskilled at running a business.

Science + Business = PHD+

Here's how PhD+ would work. Marketing, finance, HR, and product development would all be taught to chemists, physicists, and computer science students and professors enrolled in the program. Scientists who successfully run a gauntlet of these courses would then graduate into an incubator program that matches them with successful company founders or senior executives in their field as well as top-notch providers of the professional services required to launch a science-based company. The scientists would also get a nominal amount of seed funding as well as lab space and other basic ingredients to help them achieve critical mass and bring their concept close enough to product stage to interest venture capitalists or angel investors.

We also need to rethink the importance we ascribe to technology licensing. It should be subordinated to entrepreneurship as a scheme for pushing technology into the world. Instead of being rewarded for generating license revenue, technology transfer offices should be measured on the number of startups they help spawn, and by the employment and revenue created by these startups.

When these companies succeed, the university benefits as well. Consider Stanford University, widely perceived to have the best technology transfer program in the world. Stanford received technology licensing fees of only $62 million in 2008. At the same time, the school received nearly $1 billion in philanthropic contributions. At Stanford, the largest givers are typically alumni entrepreneurs such as Google (GOOG) founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Page and Brin took their basic research work on search engines and converted it into one of the world's most valuable companies.

By vastly improving how people find information online, Page and Brin improved the world. Their work epitomizes how innovation flows from people, not patents. The PhD+ model would cost a tiny fraction to implement—perhaps several billion dollars—compared with bolder plans to boost basic sciences. And it puts money into the right place: the people—not the new lab building.

Basic science is a key to our future. But capitalizing on past discoveries and using what we have by equipping people to unlock the potential in their science and themselves will offer a faster path to those million science jobs as well as a bigger boost to our struggling economy.

Wadhwa is senior research associate at the Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School and executive in residence at Duke University. He is an entrepreneur who founded two technology companies. His research can be found at www.globalizationresearch.com. Follow him on Twitter "@vwadhwa". Robert E. Litan is the vice president for Research and Policy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City. He is co-author, with Carl Schramm and William Baumol, of Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity, published by Yale University Press in 2007. He is also a senior fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution.

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