By Nick Robertson ( July 2, 2026, 14:54 GMT | Comment) -- Joseph Allen, president of the Bayh-Dole Coalition, didn’t know much about innovation policy when he started helping craft his coalition’s namesake university patent rights bill in the late 1970s. It transformed the commercialization of federally-funded research. Now over four decades after the bill’s passage, he worries lawmakers have forgotten the problems Bayh-Dole was designed to solve.Joseph Allen was a mid-20s congressional staffer when he started contributing to what would become the Bayh-Dole Act, legislation that reshaped public-private innovation partnerships by allowing universities to keep the patent rights to their inventions. Now, as the president of the Bayh-Dole Coalition, he’s fighting to keep the law’s legacy alive for a new generation who never saw why the framework mattered in the first place....
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