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By Harindra B. Dassanayake
Increasing the relevance of higher education has been a concern of policymakers for a long time. Making Sri Lanka a knowledge economy has been a catch phrase of politicians and academics alike.
Several ambitious policies have been introduced to increase the number of graduates, diversifying the degree programmes, promoting inter-disciplinary research, producing more graduates in technology-related streams have been at the core of these policy measures. Progress has been made, although not at the desired speed.
The newest addition to this wish-list for higher education is commercialisation of research through successful business ventures involving private sector partnerships or business start-ups. Some universities have already seen their research translated into products in the grocery store, or in the high-tech international markets.
However, if the model is to succeed, we are going to see a lot more changes in the university landscape: from transformations in the higher education policy to enable technology transfers, obtain patents and incubating businesses, as well as in the attitudes among the policy makers and academia itself towards commercialisation of research.
As farcical as it sounds, the biggest obstacle to systematically commercialise technology is the lack of technology itself. Sri Lanka ranks very low among its peers in terms of manufacturing exports portfolio worth of a mere 5% of its economy, compared with Thailand’s 53%, Singapore’s 56% or Malaysia’s 24%.
In terms of high tech product exports from Sri Lanka, the figures are as low as 0.9% (2012) compared to South Asia average of 6.2%, and 8.2% for the lower middle-income countries, the category to which we belong. One of the key reasons for this low level of technology application is the lack of research in the country, which is 0.16% of GDP. That is lower than many of its South Asian peers. India, Pakistan and Nepal spend 0.85%, 0.35% and 0.30% respectively. So, the proverbial ‘to each, what is his’.
This situation is not helped much by the fact that our universities remain predominantly teaching institutes, where research is not the primary focus. World Economic Forum estimates Sri Lanka as one of lagging behind country in the region in university-industry collaboration in research and development (R&D), patents, corporate research and development spending, and the quality of science research institutions.
However, several emerging trends reveal that things are improving. New research institutes have been established as public-private partnerships and new university-assisted start-up businesses have been emerging. In the last five years, patent applications by universities and other public-funded research organisations have risen.
In the traditional sense, universities performed a knowledge transfer function. Their professors were not keen to protect their discoveries, inventions or creations under intellectual property by obtaining patents, but to disseminate their knowledge through publications or conference presentations. However, there is an emerging trend for universities and other public research organizations around the world to protect their inventions.
Such protection of knowledge is possible because they engage in market-relevant research, which can be translated into actual products and services in the market. Once a patent is obtained, the university can disseminate the new knowledge without losing their right to it. This model has held universities in the Western world to raise additional funding for research or let their graduates or faculty start their own ventures.
Universities in the USA have done remarkably well in obtaining patents. For instance, University of California holds roughly 4,500 active patents, and has applied for close to twice as patents as the whole of Sri Lanka’s 480 applications. Obtaining patents at the university or institute level increases the possibility for industry to engage closely with research, thereby, increasing the social and private returns from public funding to R&D.
Sri Lanka’s intellectual property law is silent on the ownership of research conducted with public funding. It, therefore, is up to the ‘professor’s privilege’ or researchers themselves and the institutes to decide on what to do with their research findings. Therefore, revising the Intellectual Property Act of Sri Lanka (No. 36 of 2003. 2. (1)) to bring about more clarity towards ownership of Intellectual Property (IP) created with public money is a vital first step. First things first.
The pioneering piece of legislation in this regard was the US Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 which granted recipients of federal R&D funds the right to patent inventions and license them to firms. The main motivation for this legislation was to facilitate the exploitation of government-funded research results by transferring ownership from the government to universities and other contractors who could then license the IP to firms. This act paved the way for broad systematisation of IP management.
Obtaining an IP is far from getting a product to the market. Almost always, bringing a product to the market requires a lot of work that can be costly and strenuous. The university researchers may not be able to handle it themselves. To bridge the gap between invention and commercialisation, universities have established ‘technology transfer offices’ (TTOs), on campus or off-campus intermediaries that carry out a wide range of functions, from licensing patents to companies to managing research contracts.
There is a great diversity among the various types of TTOs available around the world, though they provide broadly the same service of helping research to cross the ‘valley of death’ from ‘a research outcome’ to ‘a market product’, by commercialisation of early stage technology.
It takes a long time since a research idea translates in to real research outcome. The process goes through experimentation and failures before one can declare an invention or a development and get an IP. That is the ‘head-to-mouth’ time. Becoming a marketable product involves another ‘mouth-to-hand’ time, that is equally strenuous.
During this period of time, one has to make the decision if that is an invention that is marketable, if the economies of scale can support the product, identifying right kinds of early-stage high impact development and what kind of commercialisation suits the nature of the product and many others. On the other hand, there will have to be proof-of-concept production, prototyping, de-risking the existing technology, so that an investor considers undertaking it, and finding and convincing investors. These are tasks that require marketing skills and not laboratory skills.
In the USA and around the developed world, a profession has developed around this relatively new but highly important function. They are called the University Technology Managers.
They do the hard work for obtaining patents, licencing them to private entities or help develop start-ups to commercialise the research. Often, such work need an entirely different set of skills than the inventors.
Qualified technology transfer professional services are still in short supply around the world, and in Sri Lanka, they are in zero-supply. As in many other occasions, government pay structures prevent from recruiting the best ones (let’s be reminded that, Sri Lanka pays its academics worse than most African countries).
If Sri Lanka wants to become a knowledge economy, we must take a few things seriously. Thre are long-term concerns. Our research and development budget needs to be thickened gradually to the range of 1.5% to 1.75% over the next few years and make funding available to innovation in potentially high-impact areas.
Serious and quick measures to produce science graduates are necessary to improve the current percentage of 15% graduates in the science and technology sector employments.
But in the short run, IP laws need to be revised to enable university-industry partnerships, thereby bringing the industry and university research labs much closer and receptive to each other. Secondly, a Technology Transfer Office needs to be set up under the University Grants Commission or the Ministry of Higher Education to facilitate IP obtaining, licencing and business incubating to help some research taking place in the labs to the market.
Though that office can be set up initially with public funding support or a loan, it should sustain itself by means of royalties and licence fees raised by converting research into marketable IPs, licences or incubating start-ups that are going to share their profits.
Without this sustainability measure, it will be another burden on the government coffers. We’re good at ‘hand-to-mouth’. Can we reverse the process equally better?
