USC ranks 37th in licensing revenue


Though many universities nationwide are trimming their budgets and tightening their purse strings, few are cutting costs when it comes to patents and licensing, and USC is no exception.

Patents and licenses can be expensive undertakings, but the reward is typically worth it. A recent survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education showed that USC brought in $7,270,538 in licensing in 2008, ranking 37th in the country. In the same year, USC applied for 135 patents and was issued 41. Additionally, the school formed five start-up companies.

At the university level, patents can be very useful for the wide range of discoveries that occur on campus with the extensive amount of research constantly being done.

The USC Stevens Institute for Innovation helps innovators at the school apply for patents and licenses.

“One of the missions [of USC Stevens] is to get ideas out into society and sometimes you need intellectual property protection,” said Richard Hull, senior director for innovation advancement at USC Stevens.

Hull said patents can cost up to $1,000 per country.

Though patents are costly, inventions that are successful bring money back to the inventor.

Hull gave the hypothetical example that if someone created a drug with cancer-curing abilities at the Keck School of Medicine the Stevens Institute would help him file for patent protection for his product.

If it received this patent, it would enter a license agreement with a company, which would in turn take the drug through the necessary chemical trials. If the drug were to be successful, USC and the inventor would receive a certain percentage of the revenue.

Hull said that most of the money received through this process goes back to the schools that made the discoveries.

“The money comes into USC Stevens and then we distribute it out, either to the schools, the proper office or the inventors themselves,” Hull said.

Although the income from the 2008 fiscal year topped $7 million, Hull stated that this number varies year to year.

“We try to forecast how much licensing we’re going to get, but it is subject to significant fluctuations,” Hull said.

Hull said he was pleased with USC’s national ranking, though he hopes to see the university’s licensing income increase over the next few years.

Hull said USC patents potential drugs, medical devices, electromechanical devices and methanol fuel technologies, among other innovations.

Behrokh Khoshnevis, director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies, is working on one such innovation. He has spent the last few years working on an automated construction project called Contour Crafting, with funding  from USC Stevens.

Contour Crafting technology is an innovation that will automate the construction of structures and sub-components.

“Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air conditioning,” according to Khoshnevis’ website.

He has received a number of patents for this project, the most recent coming last January for the robotic aspects of the project.

USC Stevens has helped Khoshnevis by paying for the different patents for his work. However, he has not yet received any licenses for this project.

“We’ve received a lot of interest and inquiries but no license yet,” said Khoshnevis, who is also a professor in the department of industrial and systems engineering.

He plans to further this project through “experimentation and improvement.”

The licensing process, however, has been affected by the economic downturn, according to Hull. Though this has not yet affected licensing revenue, Hull suspects it will in the future.

“We will see some of the effects in the years to come,” he said.

Hull did not yet have figures on how the licensing income changed in the 2009 fiscal year.