The federal government once held roughly 28,000 patents on inventions arising from taxpayer-supported research. Almost none of them went anywhere. By 1980, the government had managed to license fewer than 5% of them.
Then Congress changed the rules.
The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 allowed universities, nonprofits, and small businesses to retain patent rights to federally supported inventions and license those discoveries to private companies willing to develop them.
Nearly half a century later, the impact of that law can be measured in the trillions. A new report estimates that the commercialization of federally supported university and nonprofit research generated as much as $3.3 trillion in economic output and $1.7 trillion in GDP between 1996 and 2025.
