Commercialized Federal Research Has Generated Trillions

Federally funded research continues to yield big payoffs for the broader national economy, new data shows.

Between 2021 and 2025, the commercialization of university and nonprofit research that benefited from federal funding added as much as $577 billion to gross economic output, $288 billion in gross domestic production and more than one million jobs, according to a report the Bayh-Dole Coalition published Tuesday.

Those gains, the report argues, are the latest evidence of the success of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which allows universities, not-for-profit corporations and small businesses to patent and commercialize federally funded inventions. Prior to the legislation, the federal government owned the intellectual property of any discoveries made with federal research dollars. It gave universities little incentive to find practical uses for inventions, and fewer than 5 percent of the 28,000 patents held by federal agencies pre-1980 had been licensed for use, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

But Bayh-Dole changed that.

Since 1980, the annual number of patents issued on inventions benefiting from federal funding increased more than 70-fold, according to the report. And while the federal government owned most such patents prior to Bayh-Dole’s enactment, by 2025 universities owned about 60 percent, compared to just 9 percent held by the federal government.

Between 1996 and 2025, technology transfer from federally funded university and nonprofit research generated some $3.3 trillion in economic output across the United States. The report notes that the economic impact figures are based on self-reported data and are likely an underestimate.

“America’s innovation leadership depends not only on world-class research, but also on a commercialization system capable of moving discoveries from the laboratory to the marketplace efficiently and effectively,” the authors of the report wrote. “Protecting and strengthening this system will help ensure that technologies benefiting from federally funded research continue to deliver lasting economic and societal benefits for generations to come.”