Purdue University has become a patent creating machine.
While the recent news is that Purdue in 2022 generated more patents – 192 – than all but four academic institutions globally, this story has been decades in the making. The information was published in a report from the National Academy of Inventors.
Before we get into how Purdue laid the groundwork for this achievement, let’s look at the significance of the recent accomplishment.
First, Purdue is no one-year phenomenon. The top-five breakthrough comes on the heels of Purdue’s No. 6 ranking in 2020 and 2021, when it received 175 and 169 patents, respectively.
Importantly, the reporting includes multiple campuses in the same system. For example, the University of California system (ranked No. 1), with 10 campuses, and the University of Texas system (ranked No. 4), with eight. It also includes international universities, including King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia (ranked No. 3) and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (ranked No. 12).
Purdue had the second most patents of any single university campus behind only the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (ranked No. 2 overall). The other single campus schools in the top five were Stanford University, Harvard University and California Institute of Technology, all of which are academic and research stalwarts with global reputations.
Indiana University was the only other Indiana school to make the top 100 ranking, coming in at No. 74 with 46 patents.
“In achieving our highest annual ranking of U.S. patents so far, Purdue, along with MIT, stand out as single American campuses without medical schools that count among the most active in inventions,” says Purdue President Mung Chiang. “Boilermaker inventors are colleagues and students who translate their knowledge creation through a foundation for direct impact to society. Half of the equation in the recently launched Purdue Innovates is to provide the best support for them to disclose inventions, apply for and receive patents, and license and deploy these patented inventions.”
The Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization manages the technology transfer process to vet, protect and license innovations developed by university researchers, including filing patent applications. Its technology portfolio covers innovations in subject areas including agriculture, biotechnology, chemistry and chemical analysis, computer technology, engineering, food and nutrition, green technology, micro- and nanotechnologies and more.
Chiang, who became Purdue president in January, shows strong signs following in the footsteps of his predecessors.
Purdue’s success story’s roots go back almost a quarter century when a new breed of university president emerged.
When Martin Jischke became Purdue president in 2000, he started pushing the school’s researchers toward the commercial realm. A few years later, Indiana University President Michael McRobbie followed suit in Bloomington.
Mitch Daniels, the former Republican Indiana governor, took the effort to a new level when he became Purdue president in 2013. That triggered intensified efforts to capitalize on research at IU, the University of Notre Dame and other state schools.
Peter Kissinger, a Purdue University analytical chemistry professor whose research has given rise to several patents and helped launch a company, Bioanalytical Systems, saw a big leap forward at Purdue under Daniels, who stepped down as Purdue president in December.
“If you bring in someone with new ideas – with deep government, business and think-tank experience – you just can’t find that very often. Mitch Daniels brought in good people and was a lot more aggressive about what we could do,” Kissinger states.
It’s not as if state schools had no history with patents prior to the 2000s. After all, from research at Purdue came Orville Redenbacher popcorn, Stove Top Stuffing Mix, fiberglass and the bright-red LED lights in automobile brake lights and traffic signals. Studies at IU gave rise to Crest toothpaste and the Drunkometer (now known as the Breathalyzer blood alcohol calculator).
But many of those discoveries were commercialized outside the university system. Schools today are much more eager to keep control of the patents that are born on campus.
A piece of federal legislation with a Hoosier connection is the reason for that. The Bayh- Dole Act of 1980 gave researchers and schools financial incentive to pursue commercialization of research internally and afforded colleges and universities rights to intellectual property generated from federal funding.
Co-sponsored by then-Senators Birch Bayh, D-Indiana, and Bob Dole, R-Kansas, the bipartisan supported initiative was seen as a way to pull the United States out of the economic malaise of the 1970s.
Not all colleges and universities have taken advantage of the opportunity. It has taken a nudge from presidents like McRobbie, Jischke and Daniels to academics and academic institutions initially hesitant to dive into the commercial realm to propel this movement forward.
At Purdue, those efforts since 2001 have yielded 9,759 patent applications and 2,871 received from U.S. and international organizations. In the same period, there have been 288 start-up companies launched based on Purdue innovations. And from 2006 to 2022, the school’s Office of Technology Commercialization received more than $84 million in net revenue from licensing activity.
Anthony Schoettle is the director of communications for the Indiana Chamber. He started with the Chamber in 2021 after a long career in journalism. He’s won multiple awards for his storytelling ability on a wide range of business topics.
