Changing patterns of usefulness of University research - Opportunities and dangers

Until recently, most studies have shown that the contributions of university research to technological application have been indirect and partial: they have provided new skills, techniques and background knowledge that helped practitioners design and develop working artifacts, rather than developed working inventions themselves. This may now be changing in certain new fields. Internet- and bibliometric-based studies of the emergence of computational chemistry and speech recognition show that directly useful knowledge and inventions are now emerging from universities, often in the form of spin-off firms. We may speculate that the rapid improvements in computational technology have reduced the costs of virtual experimentation to a level affordable in university laboratories. Recent advances in molecular biology may have had similar effects. They have also contributed to increased pressures to obtain a direct financial return on university research, with potentially harmful long-term consequences for both science and its application.