Guest blogger Jonathan Ortmans is president of the Public Forum Institute, a non-partisan organization dedicated to fostering dialogue on policy issues. He also serves as a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation.

Experts and entrepreneurs from around the world discuss what governments can do to promote high-tech entrepreneurship and what the shape of technology entrepreneurship will be in the future.

Almost all of us enjoy technologies born in university labs or benefit from new business spawned through the dissemination of technologies from the university to the marketplace. Universities have been the lifeblood of many vibrant economies, such as Silicon Valley, whose heart is Stanford University. Considering the positive, economy-wide impact of commercialized university-developed technologies, a key question for policymakers is, “Are we are maximizing this impact?”

There are several indications that the answer to that question is negative. The federal government invests nearly $50 billion a year in university research, but there are few initiatives to help bring the benefits of new technologies to consumers in an efficient manner. Robert Litan and Lesa Mitchell of the Kauffman Foundation have developed an idea that promises to address this problem. Their proposal has been named one of Harvard Business Review’s Ten Breakthrough Ideas for 2010. They call for creating an open, competitive licensing system for university technology. [University licensing offices receive invention disclosures from faculty, staff, and students, and license those commercially viable to industry in exchange for cash royalties to inventors and their departments and schools.]

Currently, most U.S. universities channel commercialization through centralized technology licensing offices (TLOs) established in the wake of the passage of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980. This system allowed universities to gain organizational benefits and economies of scale, but over time it has slowed commercialization by monopolizing the process. Many TLOs are short-staffed and inefficient. Litan and Mitchell call for freeing up the market in technology licensing. This would require an amendment to the rules of the Bayh-Dole Act to condition federal research dollars on allowing faculty members to choose their own licensing agents [private-sector entities that provide licensing services outside universities], something that the Commerce Department could do.

In the face of declining competitiveness, a jobs crisis, and economic slowdown, the optimal commercialization of university innovations could not be more important. It is time to update policies to encourage federally supported research to translate into new products and new businesses.