What might motivate more faculty to consider potential commercial applications of their research? One thing that occasionally stands in the way is that patents do not count for tenure. And, as Diane Fabel at the Stony Brook Center for Biotechnology points out, “early career faculty are focused on tenure. They have to be. There’s not a lot of time for things that don’t contribute to that. Patents and that kind of work currently are not part of the tenure decision-making process here [at Stony Brook].” This is also the case at other institutions. Whether the tenure process should be amended to take patents and other commercial activity into account is a big question, since it would very likely have a significant impact on the culture of academic science.
