RC received an NSF grant to support a patent awareness program.

In something of a role reversal, Research Corporation’s Patent Program received a grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a 3-year experiment to identify inventive concepts arising from federally supported research in universities and bring them into public use. Eight institutions that had received government funding in 1972 were participants in the program.

The purpose of the program was to heighten awareness of faculty and administrators to the possibility of inventive concepts resulting from government-sponsored research and to point out the steps that can be taken to bring research results into public use.