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Patents, numbers of startup companies and license revenue — these are all typical measures of university success in innovation.

But one writer and data cruncher has found that West Virginia University is relatively successful by a different measure: industry research funding relative to federal research funding.

"Most metrics today count contractual units of knowledge," such as patents, Melba Kurman wrote Dec. 14 in "Best U.S. Universities for Innovation Transfer?" on the website InnovationExcellence.com. "Instead, we need to expand how we measure how effectively universities translate federal research funding into new knowledge and new technologies by honoring channels that do not involve intellectual property."

Kurman gathered 2010 data on numbers of publications, numbers of inventions disclosed and industry research funding for a large number of research universities, taking the data together as a "holistic picture of a university's activity in generating and sharing new technologies and scientific know-how."

She then manipulated the data to reveal "a refreshing new set of highly performing universities."

In an attempt to get at an elusive metric — informal interactions between university and industry scientists — Kurman looked at the amount of industry funding each university drew in 2010. To level the playing field, she normalized it by dividing by amounts of federal funding.

What she found was that Duke University received the most industry funding per million federal dollars. Next in line were not MIT or Yale or Stanford, but the University of West Florida and then West Virginia University.

It may be an indication that programs like WVU's new Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation–funded initiative known as LIINC, or Linking Innovation Industry and Commercialization, are making a difference, wrote WVU in a media release on Kurman's article.

The LIINC program works to accelerate the commercialization of research results and to create new and improve traditional ties to industry and to other regional entrepreneurial universities.

A November LIINC event, as one example of its activities, brought WVU faculty together with representatives from 22 private companies where defense-oriented product developments are under way, according to Russ Lorince, director of WVU's economic development efforts.

"It was part matchmaking, part networking, and part social event," Lorince said. "But it's all about building an innovation culture."

A growth in university-industry connections is a national trend, according to LIINC Business Development Manager Lindsay Emery, resulting in part from cuts in both government research funding and industry internal research and development funding.

LIINC is not the only WVU effort in that area, she noted. Others include the addition last year of several industry members to the WVU Research Corp.'s board of directors and the strong emphasis at the university's Advanced Energy Initiative's on faculty-industry collaboration.

Asked if the ultimate goal behind all of these metrics is start-up companies, Emery hedged.

"Actually, I don't know which direction WVU will take," she said.

LIINC program visits to peer institutions considered successful at technology transfer — Virginia Tech, Ohio State University and Carnegie Mellon University so far — have revealed a range of models.

"Carnegie Mellon has branded themselves nationally as one of the best universities for entrepreneurship, which is start-ups," Emery said. "They actually say, ‘We don't want you to create a start-up to make money, we want you to create as many as you can,' — recognizing that many fail."

But Ohio State sees start-ups as too expensive, she said.

Rather, OSU forms tailored groups of students and faculty to respond to the needs of existing industries, she explained. The program has developed a high reputation.

It's important to recognize that, by dividing industry research dollars by federal research dollars, Kurman's metric ranks a university higher that has high industry funding and relatively low federal funding — and WVU is not, for example, in the top 100 universities for federal science funding for 2009, the most recent data available from the National Science Foundation.

Still, at $174 million in fiscal 2011, the university's sponsored research funding was at a record level if fiscal 2010 stimulus funding is kept out of the picture. Ten percent of that was industry funding, and the total has been rising in response to a university-wide effort.

"We just need to keep moving forward," Emery said.

"Administrators need to keep supporting these sorts of efforts, reaching out, showing industry we're here with open arms, we want to help you, we want to provide services, be a resource to you, build those relationships," she said. "Because it's all about who you know."