Duke inventions generated $82.6 million of revenue in fiscal year 2024, marking an almost 20% decrease from $102.5 million in 2023. At the same time, the University experienced an increase in overall research expenditures from $1.39 billion to $1.5 billion.
The figures were shared in a Sept. 18 announcement from The Office of Translation and Commercialization, which collaborates with University inventors, industrial partners and entrepreneurs to bring Duke’s intellectual property “from the lab to the market.”
“Even though there's a lot of really awesome activity going on, and more money is going in for that, it's going to take a little bit for that to percolate down through the pipeline to actual technologies that we can get out into the real world,” said Fedor Kossakovski, OTC director of marketing and communications.
Despite the decline in revenue this fiscal year, OTC remains hopeful for the future. According to Kossakovski, revenue looks “pretty solid” over the next few years as the larger patents are still generating recurring income and the hope is that they can continue to invest more money back into University inventors and their labs.
Invention disclosures, which are reports written by an inventor for the patent department to determine whether or not a patent is necessary for an invention, decreased from 325 disclosures in 2023 to 302 in 2024.
Kossakovski described the decrease in disclosures as “a return to a more regular cadence.” He characterized the trend as occurring across many universities as institutions scale down from the abnormally high number of disclosures and “fast-paced innovation” during the pandemic when access to campus labs was limited due to COVID-19 measures.
“Probably what it was, is that inventors were not in the lab as much and had more time, and were like, ‘Oh, I'll file that disclosure,’” he said.
The number of new startups created through the OTC also decreased from 15 in 2023 to six in 2024.
Kossakovski discussed how the startup world is very volatile, noting that invention disclosures can be a more trackable metric. For him, the decrease from the last fiscal year is difficult to read into, especially with multiple Duke startups that are not funneled through OTC’s system and thus are not included in the report’s metrics.
Daniel Dardani, OTC director of physical sciences and digital innovations licensing and corporate alliances, urged people to look beyond the pure numbers and more at the influence of the University’s technology.
“The bottom line is we want to really emphasize the impact that Duke’s innovations have in society, both locally and nationally, at a bigger macroscopic level,” he said. “So focusing on the income and the numbers becomes less important than thinking about … the impact that Duke's technology has.”
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