In 2014, he pledged $120 million to two Swiss universities, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich, to establish a center to accelerate medical breakthroughs.
McGourlay says that before these centres sprang up, universities were making breakthroughs that had no commercial home, while companies could not justify the cost and time of imaginative research and development.
Researchers in university labs find vast numbers of breakthroughs which can better the world.
As Sevillano-García and Vázquez-Cano (2015) warn in a study on mobile devices in Spanish universities, "viewing each technological breakthrough as the quintessence of educational innovation is a mistake; other variables must also be considered, such as existing context and culture, educational practices and relations, and the way those involved conceive of teaching-learning processes" (107).
Entrepreneurs can work hand in hand with universities in commercializing scientific breakthrough, but they can't invest the time and money to create them.
Just as he was beginning his research, a Japanese university scientist made a breakthrough that transformed gallium nitride into a contender.
Just as he began his research, a Japanese university scientist made a breakthrough that transformed gallium nitride into a contender; Nakamura then perfected a cheap way to make the stuff.
We also see a lot of teams that are fresh out of school, usually a supervising professor with a couple of his or her PhD students having come across some kind of technological breakthrough in university and trying to commercialize that.
Now the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based think-tank for rich countries, is planning to make the task a bit easier, by producing the first international comparison of how successfully universities teach.That marks a breakthrough.
"It's a breakthrough budget for universities," says Western Ontario President Paul Davenport.
Companies are finding it more profitable and reliable to scour the world for breakthrough technologies in universities, smaller companies, and national laboratories and license those technologies rather than rely on their own research staff to produce the breakthroughs they need.
