LSU has made the list of Top 100 universities worldwide granted U.S. patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office, according to the newly released ranking by the National Academy of Inventors and Intellectual Property Owners Association.
LSU barely landed on the list, tying for 94th with the City University of New York and Washington State University. Still, the ranking is significant because technology transfer has long been an area where LSU, a major research institution, has lagged its peers, and in recent years it has beefed up its efforts to improve.
Andrew Maas, who was brought to LSU in 2014 to head its Office of Innovation and Technology Commercialization, says the university’s presence on the prestigious list shows that several years of hard work are paying off.
“We work with the faculty; together we can accomplish great things,” says Maas. “We’ve really made a push to provide the right services to the faculty at the right time.”
LSU was granted 26 patents in 2016. Of those, 12 came through Maas’ office on the Baton Rouge campus. The others came from the LSU Health Sciences Centers, the LSU AgCenter and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center. By comparison, top-ranked University of California received 505 patents in 2016. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology received 278 and third-ranked Stanford University received 244.
“We still have a long way to go,” Maas says. “But a few years ago, we weren’t even close to making this list.”
What’s potentially more significant than the patents LSU was granted last year is the number of licenses it has received for technology developed by its researchers. In the first three months of 2017, the Baton Rouge campus received 12 licenses compared to the 13 it received in all of 2016. Maas believes the university is on track to receive upwards of 17 licenses by the end of the year. In 2015, LSU licensed seven technologies. In 2014, it licensed just two.
Licenses are important because they give a company the rights to use or sell a technology, resulting in potentially lucrative royalties for the university.
“It just wasn’t a priority before,” he says. “Now it really is and we’re trying to make it easier for our researchers to get through the process and to connect with industry.”
—Stephanie Riegel
