Long before Bob Dole abandoned his presidential dreams and became the unlikely spokesman for Viagra-a celebrated product of industrial research-he gave an even bigger lift to academic research. In 1980, Dole and fellow U.S. senator Birch Bayh sponsored the Bayh-Dole Act, legislation that gave blanket permission for universities to license and profit from the fruits of federally sponsored research-rights previously held by Uncle Sam.

The Bayh-Dole act turned out to be Viagra for campus innovation. Universities that would previously have let their intellectual property lie fallow began filing for-and getting-patents at unprecedented rates. Coupled with other legal, economic and political developments that also spur patenting and licensing, the result seems nothing less than a major boon to national economic growth. Behind big university patents such as Carnegie Mellon's Lycos Internet technology and the University of Minnesota's AIDS-fighting carbovir-along with a host of lesser technologies-campus inventions supported some 280,000 jobs and generated an estimated $33.5 billion in economic activity in 1998, the last year for which figures are available.