The changes facing research universities today are every bit as profound as they were then. That change began with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 that allowed universities to license and thereby profit from the results of federally funded research. The emergence of new business models has allowed both universities and industry to reap large benefits. Recently, alliances have been added to the business model, in which faculty agree to favorable IP rights for the company in exchange for block funding. These relationships have existed for years through consortia on a pre-competitive basis.
Alliances are now with single companies addressing competitive issues.
I recommend that this metric be the criterion we use to tenure our faculty, the core asset of a university. Since granting tenure is the ultimate metric we use to evaluate the faculty, the criteria we use to tenure faculty are measures of our core values. That reward is tenure. Universities heavily invest in their faculty with the return sometimes recouped in decades, not quarters. The university invests in its faculty with the expectation that they will repay that investment through research, teaching, and service.