This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

In the United States we spent about a hundred and sixty billion dollars a year on R&D.

And, you know, so over the last seven years we've spent about a trillion dollars.

With about 250,000 inventions that are sitting on the shelf that have more than 13 years of patent

life and only 0.5 to 0.7% of the inventions that are federally funded get out a year.

So what does that mean get out that they're actually commercialized?

They're found and then they're commercialized.

Rosemary Truman, founder and CEO of the Center for Advancing Innovation, a Washington, D.C. based

nonprofit.

She spoke at the first Science Meets Congress event on November 15th on Capitol Hill. Scientific American and Nature

Research partnered with California Congressman Jerry McNerney. He has a doctorate in

math by the way to host the session which focused on energy solutions for a

sustainable future. So some of the challenges that we have are first of all finding

these inventions. So I just mentioned the ones that are patented so you can find them through the USPTO,

but they're about five times to ten times the amount that are not patented that are not disclosed.

So the energy efficiencies and tools of the future could be sitting there on the shelf, either patented or not.

You know what I think our big opportunity is in the United States is to significantly change the way we harness our intellectual property.

So when we give out this $160 billion a year to different organizations in a university's hospitals, research institutes across the US, we govern it properly.

So the inventions become disclosed and we have a clearinghouse for all the inventions. And we have a systematic approach to harmonizing the

data around the inventions so that you can actually mine it, characterizing it, and then

making it searchable so that you only have to go to one place.

Listen for more from this session on an upcoming episode of the long-form scientific

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