How Valuable is Federal Research? It Depends How You Count

Policymakers waste time trying to calculate the dollar value of government research and development, a new report suggests. Instead, legislators and watchdogs should take the long view of federal research and development efforts. 

The Department of Commerce recently compiled an analysis of federal "technology transfer" efforts -- programs designed to transition research projects out of government labs and into the hands of citizens, or, sometimes, private companies.

Scientists at the Department of Agriculture, for instance, developed oat-based concentrates that can be added to yogurt or other products, making them creamier and less runny. Food manufacturer Z-Trim is licensing the technology for markets including school lunches, according to the report. 

The report shows that federal agencies have ramped up technology transfer by some metrics. 

For one, the number of invention disclosures from agencies grew 19 percent between the 2009 and 2013 fiscal years. But it's difficult to pin down the total economic impact of these programs on the public, Michael Walsh, a senior economist at the National Institutes for Standards and Technology and compiler of the report, told Nextgov. "We are too consumed with calculating an exact return on investment for each taxpayer dollar," he said. "There are a variety of ways of looking at impact."

Walsh assembled the summary based on reports submitted by the agencies themselves. Aside from standard measurements such as patent applications, income generated by licenses and research partnerships, the report included newer metrics such as the number of scientific articles authored by federal agencies, or the number of startups licensing federal technology. 

Walsh advised policymakers that they should become more familiar with each agency's mission, and their individual technology programs, before drawing conclusions about how valuable their research dollars are. 

• Federal agencies filed 20 percent more patent applications -- 2,507 -- in the 2013 fiscal year, and the number of patents actually issued grew by 42 percent to 1,990
• The Department of Energy reported 1,796 invention disclosures, the largest of any agency. NASA had 1,615 and the Defense Department had 1,032. Together, these agencies made up 84 percent of the invention disclosures that year.
• DOE had the largest number of income-bearing licenses with 3,709, but the Department of Health and Human Services had the most licensing income, with $116.4 million
• Federal Cooperative Research And Development Agreements, or CRADAs, grew by 12 percent between the 2009 and 2013 fiscal years, and the total number of new CRADA agreements grew by 39 percent. 
• The Defense Department had the largest number of CRADAs with 2,682, followed by the Department of Commerce and the Department of Veterans Affairs with 2,428 and 1,422 respectively. 
• In the 2013 fiscal year, Thomson Reuters found that federal researchers co-authored, or authored, 39,147 science and engineering-related articles. About 22 percent of these were related to biological science. 
• In the same year, more than 13,026 of these articles were cited in U.S. patents. 

Technology transfer measurement has been the subject of scrutiny. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office reported that DOD's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency did not have a consistent definition of technology transfer, making it difficult to assess how successful those programs are.