Gap Funding in the USA and Canada

Abstract

Successful technology transfer of innovations arising from university research is often hindered by the lack of development funds to add value to these nascent discoveries. Within a university context, ‘gap funding’ is, for example, grant research funding that supports the demonstration of technical feasibility, prototype development, and/or assists with broadening patent claims and strengthening licensing opportunities. It is this early development stage that constitutes the bottleneck in which the transfer of promising technologies in academia can often languish or come to a halt from the lack of even a modest amount of such funding. This paper reports on measured outcomes of two such gap funding programmes at the authors' institution, presented as case studies that demonstrate the importance of this type of funding, and provides several recommendations for grants administration. In addition, results of a survey conducted on the status of gap funding programmes at other academic institutions in North America are presented. Surprisingly few such programmes exist in North America and very few have reported outcomes. The case study results support the conclusion that gap funding programmes are critical to technology development and transfer within a university setting and can provide valuable returns on the investment. These returns include enhancing patenting and licensing efforts as well as various collateral benefits such as the number of publications created; students trained; spin-offs formed; and the leveraging induced as measured by the amount of follow-on federal and industrial sponsored research dollars.