Abstract:

Intellectual property is a critical issue among institutions of higher education in America. Formal and informal institutional operations consistently create opportunities for formal recognition of intellectual property production. According to Crews and Vare, 2004, “Owning, creating and leveraging your intellectual property is rapidly becoming an integral part of any business – especially those in life sciences tasked with creating and bringing to markets new and better ways to improve our health and well-being.” Traditionally, the focus of intellectual property production has been on an institution’s faculty. However, intellectual property production is no longer the exclusive expectation of institutional faculty only. Though informal, intellectual property production is emerging as an expectation of other members of the institutional communities such as administrative staff, and students. Increasingly, more institutions are realizing the financial value directly associated with supporting, promoting, and marketing patented intellectual properties produced in an institution’s community. Indeed, intellectual property production has emerged as a critical stream of an unlimited source of funds. Unfortunately, the latter observation is not as apparent as it could be. Perhaps the most important roadblock to any institution of higher education is a lack of institutional organization to tap into promising sources of new revenue. The latter observation is widespread throughout the American higher education landscape. Therefore, the primary rationale for this study was to investigate the extent to which informal and formal efforts are underway to grow intellectual capacities to generate new institutional revenue streams. Consequently, random samples of higher education were systematically generated to quantitatively investigate the status of intellectual production to generate revenue-producing outcomes. A correlational non-parametric research design was developed. Collected samples of data were collected and scaled in order to test three null hypotheses using the Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test.

Three primary research questions were generated and they are:
1)To what extent does dedicated intellectual property support units exist among three sub-groups of higher educational institutions?
2)To what extent is intellectual property production generating new institutional revenue streams between three sub-groups of institutions,
3)To what extent are there differences within and between three sub-groups of higher education institutions relative to intellectual property support units, intellectual property production, and revenue stream generation?

All three null hypotheses were rejected. Findings indicated that there were statistically significant differences among three groups of institutions relative to the existence of intellectual property support units. In addition, findings indicated that there were statistically significant differences among three institutional sub-groups relative to intellectual property production and generation of new institutional revenue streams.

Keywords:

American higher education, intellectual property, formal and informal administrative units.