Google’s Lesson to Chinese Universities

PRLog (Press Release) - Aug 19, 2009 -
When Google went public in the U.S. in August of 2004, Stanford University profited close to USD 1 billion, split among the computer science department and the school of engineering of the University.  

As the story goes, Google started as a research project in a garage when founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were Ph.D. students at the computer science department at Stanford University.    They thought that algorithm could be used to build a search engine far superior to existing ones, and relied on a new kind of technology which analyzed the relevance of the back links that connected one webpage to another.

In August of 1996, the initial version of Google was made available on the Stanford University website.  As their research project showed promise, they founded Google Inc. and attracted angel investors from the University and individuals such as Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, also a Stanford spin-off, where “Sun” stood for “Stanford University Network”.  Once Page and Brin tested and proved their product at their thesis studies, the rest became history.  
“This was such a fascinating story when I was a graduate student there while the news was still developing,” stated Charles Chan, a Stanford graduate (’06) and a foreign legal counsel at Lehman Lee and Xu. “What was equally fascinating was how Stanford exploited its IP policy to its advantage and became an unequivocal winner,” referring to Stanford’s technology transfer program for graduate students where one-third of all licensing and IPO incomes belong to the department, one-third to the school of engineering, and the remaining one-third to the student inventors.  

“MIT, Berkeley, and Cal Tech have mature tech transfer departments providing comprehensive schemes to control, monitor and license technologies developed by their students so as to progressively grow the endowment of their universities,” added Mr. Edward Lehman, managing director of Lehman Lee and Xu. “Chinese university ought to start cultivating their tech transfer programs or to reevaluate their existing schemes to ensure university-developed technologies are adequately captured.”

Lehman Lee and Xu is a well respected Chinese law firm and trademark and patent agency with offices in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Macau, and Mongolia.  The firm is managed by Mr. Edward Lehman, a leading expert on corporate law with over 20 years of practice experience in Mainland China.