Industry-funded academic inventions boost innovation

摘要

Governments have long encouraged university-industry collaboration, hoping to spur innovations that bring jobs, investment and life-enhancing products. At the same time, shrinking government budgets for science have forced universities to look to other sources of funding. According to the US National Science Foundation, in 2012, industry supplied just over 5% (some US$3.2 billion) of US research universities' annual expenditure. But the role of corporations in academic research is controversial. For example, when oil company BP announced in 2007 that it would pay $500 million to fund a decade of alternative-energy research by a consortium headed by the University of California, Berkeley, this prompted a backlash.