CMOS Camera-on-a-Chip Pioneer Warns Bayh-Dole Reforms Threaten Tech Transfer

Roughly seven billion CMOS image sensors roll out of factories every year, powering cameras in smartphones, laptops and autonomous vehicles. The man who led the invention of that technology says it almost never left the laboratory — and warns that proposed federal rule changes could block the next generation of breakthroughs from reaching the market.

Eric Fossum, who led development of the "camera-on-a-chip" at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the 1990s, laid out his case in a commentary for Fortune. His team's complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor replaced bulky camera components with a tiny semiconductor chip. But inventing it, he argues, was only half the battle. The other half was the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which lets universities, research laboratories, nonprofits and small businesses retain patent rights to inventions arising from federally funded research.

The numbers behind the law are stark. Before Bayh-Dole, the government generally owned taxpayer-funded inventions from university labs. By 1980, fewer than 5% of the roughly 28,000 patents the government held had been licensed for commercial use. Many promising inventions never became products.

Since Bayh-Dole took effect, university technology transfer has helped launch more than 21,000 technology startups, developed over 200 new drugs and vaccines, and contributed nearly $2 trillion to the U.S. economy, according to Fossum.

From JPL lab to Photobit

Fossum's own path illustrates the mechanism. After his team developed the camera-on-a-chip at JPL, he and Dr. Sabrina Kemeny founded Photobit Corporation to commercialize it. They received an exclusive license to their invention from the California Institute of Technology, which operates JPL and held the patent rights under Bayh-Dole.

That license made the difference. "That exclusive license gave us the assurance we needed to attract investment and move the technology beyond the research lab," Fossum writes. Photobit then refined the sensor and persuaded electronics companies to adopt an unfamiliar alternative to the dominant imaging technology of the time.

Fossum went on to a professorship at Dartmouth and later co-founded Gigajot Technology Inc., continuing to develop imaging technologies. He says he has helped dozens of faculty and PhD students commercialize their own inventions. Larger companies often acquire these startups once the underlying technology and market have been derisked, adding further value to the economy, he notes.

"None of this can happen without Bayh-Dole," Fossum writes.

The reform threat

The warning lands at a moment when several federal agencies are weighing changes to rules governing research grants and intellectual property. Fossum cites two examples. One agency has proposed revisions to its financial assistance guidance that would give it a greater role in licensing patented inventions that benefit from its funding, rather than leaving those decisions to institutions as Bayh-Dole prescribes. A detailee at a federal research agency went further, proposing the Bayh-Dole framework be abandoned altogether.

Such changes may sound procedural. Fossum disagrees. Successful technology transfer depends on predictable rules, he argues, because researchers, universities, investors and companies need confidence that funding and intellectual property terms will remain stable through the long process of bringing an invention to market.

"Before policymakers change those rules, they should be confident they aren't obstructing early-stage discoveries from becoming real-world products," he writes.

Fossum closes with the core of his argument: when his team built the camera-on-a-chip, nobody could predict all its eventual uses. Breakthrough innovations routinely surprise their creators — but only if they escape the lab. For business, the stakes are concrete: weakening the licensing framework that has spawned 21,000 startups and $2 trillion in economic value would raise the risk premium on every federally funded spinout to come.