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David Boethel has become pretty good at predicting the outcome of LSU’s football bowl games, though his methods are unusual.

At the LSU AgCenter’s annual conferences, Boethel, the center’s vice chancellor for research, always includes in his presentation a comparison of intellectual-property royalties generated per research dollar spent against the peer enterprises of whichever school the Tigers are playing in that postseason.

Lately, LSU has been whipping those schools in royalties, too.

“I’ve been able to predict the winner the last three years,” says Boethel, the director of the Louisiana Agricultural and Experiment Station. “We had Georgia Tech, Ohio State and Notre Dame, and we beat all of them in terms of these kind of statistics.”

In terms of bang for the buck, the LSU AgCenter outperforms several universities in U.S. News & World Report’s top tier.

“That’s not to say that you can do it every year,” Boethel says. “You have up years and down years, but we’ve been pretty consistent the last few years.”

If MIT fielded a team, LSU would have them beat as well. Their research budgets are nowhere close—$63 million in 2007 for the AgCenter versus $1.2 billion for MIT. But in terms of royalty income per dollar spent, LSU wins, with a 6.8% return on its investment compared to 5% for MIT.

The AgCenter doesn’t always get its due as an economic driver, despite its success generating royalties, patents and licenses.

Blame the “plows, sows and cows” stigma, Chancellor Bill Richardson says. But royalties are royalties. The AgCenter’s rice research, for instance, has generated tens of millions of dollars in additional research funding in fees agricultural companies pay the AgCenter for developing improved varieties.

Only about 25% of the AgCenter’s rice station budget comes from state funding. The rest comes from self-generated grants and contracts with those companies.

“Some of the technologies are kind of traditional ag technologies such as variety development—rice varieties and wheat varieties and cotton varieties,” Richardson says. “That’s the traditional thing that land-grant agriculture programs have been focused on, but they’ve been very instrumental in increasing economic development.”

Richardson says his campus, over the past few years, has generated between 85% and 90% of the royalty income coming into the entire LSU System. Of course, ag school research tends to focus more on applied science, though LSU has been particularly aggressive in recent years.

The AgCenter has had its own IP office since 1991, the same year it issued its first patent and many years before LSU’s main campus upgraded what was essentially a one-man operation to the more robust technology transfer/intellectual property program it operates today under Brooks Keel, LSU vice chancellor for research and economic development.

LSU AgCenter

MAN AT WORK: Mewa Singh sets up a fermentation batch in the dynamic biotech laboratory. About 40 of the LSU AgCenter’s scientists—roughly 10% of the research faculty—hold either a patent or something called a plant variety protection.

In the past 10 years or so, the AgCenter has made an effort to become more entrepreneurially minded, a move reflected in its IP office hires and in its efforts to promote an entrepreneurial culture among faculty.

“Our research is probably much more applied than you might find on the [main] campus,” Boethel says. “We always tell our scientists we want you to do some discovery work, but we want that discovery work to have an end focus on a product, or at least some new information that can be adopted by our clientele or our stakeholders.”

About 40 of the AgCenter’s scientists—roughly 10% of the research faculty—hold either a patent or something called a plant variety protection—basically a patent for plants.

Richardson notes that ideas have shifted substantially in terms of IP and agriculture at LSU. In the old days, everything was funded by state dollars and so you gave your research away. It was the land-grant way. But things began to change beginning in the 1990s with tighter budgets.

“When I first came here in 1984, there was almost a negative attitude toward getting federal research dollars,” Richardson says. “The feeling was, ‘The taxpayers pay our salaries, we’re going to do what’s best for the taxpayers and we’re not going to go off to Washington chasing dollars.’ That was a pretty strong feeling at one time.

“I know some faculty members who really got chastised if they applied for money federally. That’s changed dramatically. That’s been a huge change in philosophy. Now we’re out aggressively marketing these technologies.”

Not all of them involve the plow, the sow or the cow. Boethel points to a partnership with Esperance Pharmaceuticals and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center on a project that began with AgCenter scientists looking for a nonsurgical method of creating temporary sterility in show animals.

LSU AgCenter

SAFETY FIRST: A scientist takes a sample of e coli in a biosafety hood, then performs electrophoresis.

“What happened is they found that some of the hormones they were using to do this actually had some effects on cancer cells to the point where it would attack cancers specifically and not attack surrounding tissue,” Boethel says. “That’s always a problem with many of the chemotherapy-type approaches for cancer treatment.”

Adam Knapp, CEO of the Baton Rouge Area Chamber, says that federal reporting on IP royalties, licenses and patents lumps LSU’s AgCenter in with Pennington and the main campus obscures the level of the AgCenter’s productivity. He cites Esperance and TransGenRx, both startups housed in the Louisiana Emerging Technology Center on LSU’s main campus, as successful spin-offs from AgCenter-generated research. LETC, as well as the Louisiana Fund One venture capital fund, have been integral to those companies’ success today, he says.

“The point is that they are already leading the state’s education institutions in terms of commercialization of research,” Knapp says. “I think it’s important for more people to be aware of what they’ve accomplished. I think what’s critical is to understand that what they have been good at, that commercialization of intellectual property, is the most direct way to create economic growth from research. In that sense, they are the models for the state.”

2008 adjusted licensing income by LSU System campus:

LSU AgCenter $2.5 million

Health Sciences Center, New Orleans $111,753

LSU A&M $111,359

University of New Orleans $30,871

Pennington Biomedical Research Center $8,170

SOURCE: LSU System