Sneak Preview: GAO Examines Invention Reporting Using iEdison
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants Compliance Expert article.) When recipients of federal research funding invented “useful technologies” during federal fiscal years 2020-2024, most chose to retain ownership rights, while only about one-fifth declined to do so, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found in a recent report, which also concluded that the process for reporting inventions was not always smooth or satisfying for recipients or federal agencies.
In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act (Pub. L. 96-517) to promote commercialization of inventions created using federal funding (see ¶544 in the Federal Grants Management Module). It gave recipients of federal funding a financial incentive to commercialize the invention, as they can retain title (i.e., keep ownership rights) to the resulting inventions. The act and its implementing regulations provide the legal framework for the ownership of inventions developed by recipients, and establishes time frames for when funding recipients must disclose federally funded inventions, determine whether to retain title of ownership to these inventions and apply for patent protection, among other things.
Federal agencies fund billions of dollars in research each year that can result in new inventions. This funding supports more than half of the research conducted at U.S. academic institutions; some of this research leads to useful inventions, or those with financial potential.
GAO was recently asked by Congress to review how grant recipients and federal agencies are using the federal invention disclosure process, and why no inventions were reported by certain recipients. The most common reason given for not using invention reporting (some 21% of recipients) by some university representatives was low commercial potential for the inventions (meaning they would not be likely to find a commercial partner to bring the invention to market). Small for-profit funding recipients had the lowest rate of declining ownership rights, GAO found.
Funding recipients have for some time, as GAO has reported in previous reports, cited several challenges to meeting invention reporting requirements. These challenges include inconsistent requirements across agencies, time-consuming annual reporting and delays with requests for deadline extensions. To overcome some of these difficulties and to streamline and standardize invention reporting across the federal government, iEdison, a web-based tool that facilitates invention reporting and tracking and now managed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), was created.
A July 2023 executive order directed specific federal agencies to take steps to transition to iEdison by the end of 2025. These agencies are: Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of Health and Human Services (including the National Institutes of Health), Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, Department ofHomeland Security, National Science Foundation and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). DoD and NASA were transitioning to complete use of iEdison at the time of GAO’s review.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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