Sujai Shivakumar, Charles Wessner, Shruti Sharma, and Chris Borges
Universities are among the United States’ most enduring sources of competitive advantage and a key pillar of the nation’s innovation system. Home to more than 35 of the world’s top 100 research universities, the United States owes many of its most transformative inventions of the past century to universities—from the internet and Global Positioning System (GPS) to CRISPR gene editing and mRNA vaccines. These breakthroughs, along with countless others to come out of university labs, have delivered significant benefits to the United States: new industries, sustained economic growth, and strengthened defense capabilities. Indeed, by advancing frontier technologies and training the next generation of scientists, engineers, and business leaders, universities help sustain U.S. leadership in strategic domains such as semiconductors, AI, quantum computing, and biotechnology, thereby strengthening the United States’ ability to compete with rivals and safeguarding its security interests.
The foundation of this remarkable performance is federally funded university research. By combining steady and substantial federal investment, a sophisticated system of technology commercialization, and world-class talent and facilities, university research transforms public funding into lasting economic, health, and national security benefits. While no other nation does this as well as or at the scale of the United States, China is now rapidly emerging as a peer competitor.
Driving Economic Returns
The returns on university research are substantial. Per the Association of University Technology Managers, in the 25 years between 1996 and 2020, university research generated 554,000 invention disclosures, 141,000 U.S. patents, and 15,000 startups. These inventions and new companies generated up to $1 trillion in GDP and $1.9 trillion in gross industrial output, while supporting 6.5 million jobs for U.S. workers. Put differently, every single day, federally supported university research helps launch three new startups and two new products into the economy.
Some of these innovations have fundamentally reshaped industries, if not created entirely new ones. For example, at Stanford University, federal support from the National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries Initiative enabled graduate students Larry Page and Sergey Brin to create the algorithm that became the foundation of Google’s search engine. In 2024 alone, Google Search, Google Play, Google Cloud, YouTube, and Google advertising tools collectively supported over $850 billion in economic activity for millions of U.S. businesses, nonprofits, publishers, creators, and developers. These massive economic returns stem from early federal research investments.
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