"A three-decades-long trend of increasingly strong ties between [US] industry and universities may have ended," said a National Science Foundation InfoBrief published in September 2006.

It points out that between 1972 and 2001, industrial support for US academia grew more rapidly than any other source of support for academic research and development (R&D). But between 2002 and 2006, the absolute amount of money US industry spent on R&D at academic institutions fell, and industry's share of funding for academic R&D dipped from a high of 7.9% to 4.9%.

The InfoBrief says disagreements over intellectual property (IP) were largely to blame, prompting US companies to work with foreign universities instead.

The University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP) was formed to address the issue by creating new approaches to sponsored research, licensing, and other aspects of healthy, long-term university-industry relationships. One of its first acts is the creation of TurboNegotiator, a tool to enable university and industry negotiators to move quickly towards agreement on IP.

The UIDP sprang out of work under the aegis of the Industrial Research Institute and the National Council of University Research Administrators. Its thinking was informed by two key documents, Working Together, Creating Knowledge, written by the Business-Higher Education Forum, and Responsible Partnering, jointly written by EIRMA, EARTO, PROTON and EUA.

In response the Partnership created a set of Guiding Principles for University-Industry Endeavors, which emphasises the long-term returns that can come from well constructed and well run university-industry partnerships. These are matched by a set of case studies that describe how the Guiding Principles apply to day-to-day IP negotiations.

Susan Butts, senior director, external science and technology programs at Dow Chemical and president of UIDP, says that it takes an average of five months for her company to complete a legal negotiation with an academic partner, so long that it can threaten the window of opportunity for the work.

"Why is it so hard to reach an agreement?" she asked. "It's because IP rights are a barrier. They're more contentious, they take longer, they increase transaction costs and they deliver no benefit."

Butts says the issue is linked to the implementation of the 1980 Bayh Dole Act. Before this was enacted, if a university had federal research funding, any resultant inventions belonged to the funding agency, which could licence the technology but rarely did. Since the Act was passed, if the university takes ownership of the IP, it has the responsibility to try and commercialise it.

"There have been licensing bonanzas, which have changed the way people think about university technology, moving from 'for the public benefit' to looking at it as a way to solve universities' financial problems," said Butts. It's the academic community's focus on these lucrative but rare bonanzas that has made IP negotiations so difficult.

"The interest in generating licensing income has tipped the balance to strong IP control," Butts added. "If you pay so much attention to licensing and forget about the research partnership, you kind of miss the boat."

Butts believes academia is confusing ownership of IP with the commercial success of the technology that uses it.

"It's difficult for universities to commercialise their technology because in general they don't understand the market," she said. "You need people with practical business minds."

And then there's the success rate: "Only about 2 to 3% of sponsored research projects within Dow lead to a patent."

Current US tax laws also forbid an academic institution from offering favourable licensing terms to any organisation, even if it funded the research that created the technology. Butts says this can lead to industrial partners deliberately crippling the later stages of a project in order to avoid it coming to an invention, since at that point the sponsoring company wouldn't have more than a right to negotiate.

"I think we have to change the model. I think our collaboration model has become self-limiting," said Butts. "The public interest in the US, to the extent there is one, is that universities are noble and high-minded and industry is just interested in exploiting them.

"What we see in Europe is there is more interest in collaboration for its own sake. In Europe we see more excitement about the collaboration, while in Asia it's about getting money for research."