Purdue University is about to become the first public university in the United States to sign a deal with a billionaire’s foundation that has been trying to provide $100-million endowments to universities to finance programs designed to kick-start commercialization of their inventions.
Several public and private universities have rejected the money from the Alfred E. Mann Foundation for Biomedical Engineering because of concerns that the foundation was seeking too much control over the universities’ intellectual-property rights (The Chronicle, March 17, 2006).