The economy might be hiccupping toward an uncertain fate, but one of the engines of innovation is still hitting on all cylinders. Technological advances emerging from the nation's universities are finding their way into industry at a pace that has hardly slackened in the last year. Institutions of higher learning do not cite patenting as a primary goal; top priority still goes to research and teaching. But license fees from existing patents, particularly in biotechnology, are generating hundreds of millions of dollars that universities often plow back into research.

While the business world at large is coming to its senses after the Internet hysteria of the past five years, the economics of university licensing seems to rest on more enduring verities. The first is that true technological advances are economically valuable. Another, more specific, truth is that new drugs that cure disease-or new ways to find or make these drugs-are worth a lot of money. Finally, despite the glamour of entrepreneurship, the big money for a university usually comes from patents licensed to large, established companies-not startups. With a few high-profile exceptions (most notably at MIT and Stanford, and in the University of California system), university research spawns relatively few spinoff companies.

The "Campus Patenting" chart (in PDF version) gives a glimpse of which U.S. universities are most productive in technological invention. The data, provided exclusively to Technology Review by CHI Research of Haddon Heights, NJ, establish a metric (called technological strength) that quantifies the power of a school's patent portfolio. Another table (in PDF version) has a more mercenary flavor. Here we show how much money leading research universities are reaping from licenses on the patents they own; these statistics were compiled by the nonprofit Association of University Technology Managers.

For those universities interested in maximizing licensing income, the lesson plan is simple: biotech blockbusters. Chart-topping Columbia University illustrates the point. Columbia hit the jackpot with the 1983 patent by Richard Axel on a method for inserting DNA into cells-a procedure at the heart of the production of several of today's bestselling biotech drugs, including plasminogen activator, which if administered early can lessen the damage inflicted by a heart attack. Indeed, about 80 percent of Columbia's licensing revenue comes from fees paid to the university by pharmaceutical companies for three technologies, according to Scot Hamilton, senior director of Science and Technology Ventures-the university's technology transfer organization.