In the past, Taiwan's higher education schools were able to produce a large number of scientific or technological research results annually; however, only a portion of these results could emerge and turn into patents, and the number of patents being commercialized was even less. Understandably, it was due to a shortage of effective linkage between the academia and industry that the former did not acquire sufficient financial support from the latter. The academia hence only had limited fund available to transfer research results into practice. Recently, Taiwan’s government, realizing that the bottleneck of industry upgrade is caused by a shortage of cutting-edge technologies, has stepped forward to relax the regulations related to the technology transfer of the research results achieved by higher education institutions and universities. Since such research results are a valuable nation-level asset, and theoretically should be put to wide use in the industry to thereby cultivate the innovative development of production, the government has tended to try every possible approach to expose academic research results to the industry and to, in turn, multiply the patent application rate of such research results.
To go into more detail, since academic research results and their derivative patents were state-owned property in the past, when businesses took interest in obtaining the exclusive right to exploit this kind of research results or patents, they must first go through lengthy and complex regulatory procedures and thus be prone to miss preemptive business opportunities. Now, as a consequence of the relaxation of the applicable regulations, all academic research results belong to schools and may be disposed of on their own, except for those involving national security or having a material impact on the public interest or the economy. The income from all research results attributable to a school will be recycled into a school fund or council fund for subsequent development or operation of scientific and technological researches. In order to encourage participation in industry-academia collaboration, the current law no longer prohibits public school teachers or researchers from taking up positions in start-ups, and besides, the upper limit on the number of the stocks they can hold has been raised. While public schools can be joint ventures of the companies engaged in technology researches, private schools are allowed to set up affiliates or invest businesses related to teaching, internships, experiments or research promotion. In addition, a person having attended courses related to innovative entrepreneurship offered on campus can use a school address to register his/her start-up company.
Apart from establishing a friendly legal environment, the Executive Yuan implemented in 2017 an "Innovative Environment Construction Promotion Project for Next Generation Scientific Research Talents," in an attempt to help the construction of small and flexible R&D service companies. On the other hand, the Ministry of Education has constructed, based on effective management analysis, a university intellectual property service platform, i.e. Campus I.P.R Service (acronymed as “CIS”). It was hoped that, through the recruitment and cultivation of IP experts with such service platform, academic research results could be effectively used by the target industry. Moreover, in order to efficiently link academic research results to industrial resources, to cultivate a long-term relationship between the academia and industry, and to consequently promote the setting up of new R&D service companies, in 2018, the Ministry of Education activated a project, inclusive of building service teams composed of school teachers and students, among others, to help bridge the gap between the laboratories led by researchers with Ph.D. degrees and the industry. According to the statistics published by the Executive Yuan, forty-six R&D projects in various fields proposed by twenty-six schools had been approved by the Ministry of Education by September of 2018 and could receive a subsidy of up to 6 million NT dollars per year.
It is believed that, under the government's guidance and encouragement, the production and quality of academic research results will be significantly improved and there will be more considerable school-derivative startups to be set up. Most importantly, we may expect an increase in the number of domestic and foreign patent applications derived from academic research results in the foreseeable future.