AUTM Licensing Activity Survey (LAS)

The AUTM Licensing Activity Survey (LAS) is the annual data-collection instrument run by AUTM (the Association of University Technology Managers) that gathers standardized, self-reported technology-transfer metrics — research expenditures, invention disclosures, patent applications and issuances, licenses and options executed, licensing income, and startup companies formed — from participating U.S. and Canadian universities, academic medical centers, hospitals, and research institutions for a given fiscal year. It is the field’s most widely cited benchmarking dataset: when a technology-transfer office, funder, or policy analyst cites a national or peer-institution figure for licensing income, startups formed, or patents issued from academic research, that figure traces back to the LAS more often than any other single source.

What the survey measures

Each participating institution’s technology transfer office (TTO) completes a standardized questionnaire covering a consistent set of categories for its most recently closed fiscal year, including:

• Research funding the institution administered (a denominator commonly used to normalize other metrics across institutions of very different sizes).
• Invention disclosures received from faculty, staff, and students.
• Patent applications filed and patents issued, typically split between new and cumulative counts.
• Licenses and options executed, often broken out by exclusive vs. non-exclusive terms and by licensee type (established company vs. startup).
• Licensing income received (running royalties, upfront fees, and related payments).
• Startup companies formed around a licensed institutional technology.
• TTO staffing levels and related operating metrics.

These are the same categories that underlie the field’s standard technology transfer workflow — disclosure, IP protection, licensing, and commercialization — turned into a comparable, reportable metric at each stage.

Who participates, and how

Participation is voluntary and self-reported: each institution’s own TTO submits its data directly to AUTM for its fiscal year, rather than AUTM independently auditing or verifying the figures. Historically, participation has run to roughly a couple hundred institutions in a given cycle, drawn predominantly from AUTM’s own membership base of U.S. and Canadian universities, academic medical centers, hospitals, and research institutes, though the exact number of respondents varies from year to year and CASRAI has not independently verified a specific current-cycle count — treat any precise participant total or dollar figure for a specific survey year as something to confirm directly against AUTM’s own published report for that year rather than take from a secondary summary.

STATT: the underlying database

AUTM makes a substantial portion of the historical Licensing Activity Survey data available through the STATT database (Statistics Access for Tech Transfer), a searchable tool covering several decades of accumulated survey responses. STATT lets a TTO, researcher, or policy analyst query and filter licensing, patent, and startup-formation metrics across institutions and years rather than working only from a single year’s published PDF report — this is the primary way most benchmarking and trend analysis against LAS data is actually done in practice.

Why it matters for technology transfer offices

The LAS functions as the field’s de facto benchmarking standard for three main reasons:

• Peer comparison. A TTO can compare its own disclosure, licensing, or income figures against institutions of similar research-funding scale, rather than against the field as a whole — useful for setting internal performance targets and for institutional leadership conversations about TTO resourcing.
• Policy and advocacy. Aggregate LAS figures are the evidentiary basis most often cited in policy discussions about the Bayh-Dole Act‘s real-world impact — how much licensing activity, income, and startup formation the Bayh-Dole framework has actually produced since 1980 — because it is the only dataset that tracks this consistently across institutions and years.
• Sector-level trend tracking. Multi-year LAS data is how the field itself observes and discusses broader trends — shifts in exclusive vs. non-exclusive licensing, growth in startup formation relative to licensing to established companies, and changes in per-institution licensing income over time.

This is a different kind of AUTM data product from the AUTM Better World Project, which collects narrative, lay-audience case studies of individual licensed technologies rather than aggregate institutional metrics — a Better World Project story might describe one invention’s path from lab to market, while the LAS reports how many licenses, of what kind, generated how much income across an entire institution’s portfolio in a given year. The two are complementary AUTM outputs aimed at different audiences and different purposes, not overlapping versions of the same thing.

Limitations worth knowing

Because LAS figures are self-reported rather than independently audited, and because participating institutions and exact survey questions have shifted somewhat across the survey’s multi-decade history, year-over-year and cross-institution comparisons carry some real caveats: not every eligible institution participates in every cycle, definitions of specific categories (what counts as a “startup,” for instance, or how a multi-year licensing deal’s income is attributed) can vary in how consistently they are applied, and a given year’s headline national totals reflect only the institutions that actually responded that year, not the full population of U.S. and Canadian research institutions. Anyone citing a specific LAS figure in a report or policy document should pull it from AUTM’s own published survey report or STATT for that specific year rather than from a secondary summary, and should note the response basis (how many institutions the figure is drawn from).

Frequently asked questions

Is the AUTM Licensing Activity Survey the same as the AUTM Better World Project?

No. The Licensing Activity Survey is an aggregate, quantitative dataset of institutional technology-transfer metrics (disclosures, licenses, income, startups). The AUTM Better World Project is a separate initiative that collects narrative case studies of individual licensed inventions for a lay and policymaker audience. AUTM runs both, but they serve different purposes and are not interchangeable sources.

Who can access AUTM Licensing Activity Survey data?

AUTM publishes summary survey reports and makes historical data searchable through its STATT database; specific access terms, formats, and any membership requirements for the full dataset are set by AUTM directly and should be confirmed at autm.net rather than assumed.

Does every U.S. research university participate in the survey?

No. Participation is voluntary, and not every institution with a technology transfer office responds in every cycle, so published totals reflect the responding institutions for that year rather than the entire field.

Related CASRAI content

See CASRAI’s technology transfer entry for the underlying process the survey measures, Bayh-Dole Act for the federal-funding legal framework that made the modern university TTO — and the activity the LAS tracks — possible, AUTM Better World Project for AUTM’s companion narrative-storytelling initiative, and the Technology Transfer & Innovation pillar for the broader map of invention disclosure, licensing, and commercialization content on this site.