Vnunet reports on an academia-industry agreement for the transfer of intellectual property. Parties include UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, IBM and Intel.

The transfer of intellectual property rights between academia and industry is crucial for innovation. Without technology transfer, important academic research may languish in school labs rather than lend value to society through commercialization. Industry benefits from collaboration with academia, as university research is a major source of basic R&D, while academia gains input on practical uses of that R&D.

For readers interested in academia-industry collaborations and technology transfer in the history of Internet innovation, an excellent resource is Steil, Victor and Nelson, Technological Innovation and Economic Performance, Princeton Univ Press, 2002- particularly the chapter by Mowery-Simcoe.