Tech-funds bill receives green light in committee

A Senate committee on Wednesday passed out a bill designed to give more of the state's colleges and universities a crack at funding to commercialize their research technologies.

The Senate Workforce Services and Community and Economic Development Committee advanced SB112, which also calls for a way to recover some Centers of Excellence money if the licensee of the technology exploits it outside the state.

Currently, the Centers program, which has about $3 million a year to help institutions move research technology into products, requires applicants to match any Centers funding on a 2-to-1 basis. That typically has left out institutions other than the University of Utah, Utah State University and Brigham Young University.

The original version of the bill called for matching funds for institutions that award at least 50 doctoral degrees per year across at least 15 disciplines. That was amended Wednesday so that any institution offering any doctoral degrees can participate.

"This is really designed to allow the best technology around the state to be able to at least compete — and they will be competing, though on a level playing field — for Centers of Excellence funding, but they will be competing based on the likelihood of creating business and creating jobs in the state," said program director Nicole Toomey Davis. "So we think this is fair."

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Tom Hatch, R-Panguitch, agreed.

"I think what it does is it allows some of our smaller institutions — Snow, Southern Utah University, Dixie — that perhaps have not had the capability to do this in the past, especially on their own, to at least partner with some of our major research institutions and try to develop the technology that some of them are very good at," Hatch said.

Another amendment Wednesday "softens," according to Hatch, language about where Centers funding is returned if the licensee of the university research technology does not maintain a manufacturing or service location in Utah that uses the technology or if it transfers the manufacturing or service location out of the state within a five-year period after the license is issued.

Currently the institutions receive that funding and can use it at their discretion, Hatch said. But Davis said legislators should consider whether taxpayers would be better served if that funding replenished the Centers or some other program — "to fuel the economic engine of the state," she said.