It's been a decade since Carnegie Mellon University scored a $4.5 million windfall in royalties when the wildly popular Lycos search engine was sold to a Massachusetts-based firm.

		See Graphic Tech transfer's progress

But in the years since Lycos, both CMU and the University of Pittsburgh continue to struggle to turn innovations in the laboratories into money-making ideas for the private sector. They are improving, to be sure, but both schools say they want to ramp up the pace even more.

"I want [faculty] to ... think of commercialization as something they want to participate in," said Marc Malandro, who last year took over as chief of Pitt's Office of Technology Management and has set a goal of 200 inventions, the most ever at the school, for the fiscal year that ends in June.

It's no easy task, university officials say, to turn market-altering discoveries into companies and jobs. Spinning top-notch research into the commercial marketplace takes time, patience and a slow, steady change in the mind-set of university researchers.

But the numbers show there has been progress in the 10 years since both universities made tech transfer a priority. In the fiscal year that ended June 2004, Pitt spawned a record-breaking 10 start-ups and CMU delivered four, according to a report released last fall by the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). Later figures from CMU show it spawned eight start-ups in its latest fiscal year, the most since the tech boom in the 1990s.

The number of inventions reported by the schools has risen, too, the trade group's annual study shows, as well as discoveries licensed to existing companies or start-ups.

But the numbers tell only part of the story. They don't necessarily measure how effective Pitt and CMU are at fostering economic development -- that is, turning all the technology bred within its walls into companies and ventures that create jobs here and elsewhere.

The university technology trade group's figures show both Pitt and CMU are producing inventions, licenses, patents in line with other universities that spend the same on research -- and even more in some cases at CMU. In several of the past five years, CMU's commercial output was nearly double that of other schools that spend similar amounts on research.

While Pitt has increased the number of its discoveries, licenses and start-ups each year -- the most recent AUTM numbers show a record number 140 inventions in fiscal 2004 and 53 licensing deals -- it hasn't outpaced its peers like CMU has.

By one standard -- universities on average produce one invention per $2.5 million in research and development expenditures -- Pitt is actually trailing behind, failing to reach the 1-to-2 ratio each of the past four years. CMU, on the other hand, routinely performed well, often delivering more discoveries than the national invention-to-R&D average. Pitt spent $558.8 million on research in fiscal 2004, while CMU spent $225.1 million.

Industry observers point out that the volume of inventions or number of start-ups a university generates in a year isn't the best judge of how well it commercializes research and contributes to local economic development.

After all, they said, not every invention is meant for the marketplace and a university doesn't seek to commercialize all its discoveries. Indeed, scientists often argue that some of the best discoveries come from research that's driven solely for pure research's sake, with no hidden goal of trying to create a commercial product.

Some schools, such as research behemoths Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins, have larger R&D budgets and thus typically turn out more commercial innovations. Others have been in the commercialization game a lot longer and have been focusing their efforts on technology transfer long before Pitt and CMU launched theirs in the '90s.

"This region is not as mature," said Dr. Art Boni, Pitt's first technology transfer chief who led the university's office for five years. "It takes ... a period for the culture of entrepreneurship to develop."

University officials said educating faculty members is a critical component -- making them aware that the tech transfer exists and encouraging them to imagine the commercial potential of their research.

Both Pitt and CMU said that in recent years, they have boosted their efforts to reach out to faculty and researchers.

"They aren't sitting there thinking, 'I'm going to start a company next year.' If they were thinking that, they wouldn't be here," said Carolyn Green, Pitt's director of the Office of Enterprise Development, Health Sciences. Ms. Green's office was formed this decade to help Pitt researchers identify the market potential of their work.

Transforming a research institution into one that is thinking about commercial possibilities takes time, proponents and observers say. They note that if researchers necessarily wanted to be entrepreneurs, they may have picked business school over medical school or a PhD. in some other field.

Moreover, the number of start-ups ultimately doesn't matter if none exist a few years later, said Robert A. Lowe, a CMU economist who has published a study on how well Western Pennsylvania is doing in propelling research from the lab to the marketplace.

Dr. Lowe, who recently launched his own CMU-spawned start-up with another faculty member, said a better measure might be to consider how many total "active" start-ups a university has produced and compare that with how much money the university has spent each year on research and development. He said by that measure, the region has been doing pretty well.

Tech transfer, say university officials, isn't about making money for the university. By law, they are required to try to commercialize federally funded research -- a major source of research dollars -- to turn it into something useful to the public.

"Our job is not so much to find the best hits and make money," said Christina Gabriel, the outgoing vice provost and technology transfer chief at CMU. "Our job is to get as many things [as we can] out there.''

In 2000, Dr. Gabriel and Robert Wooldridge, director of CMU's Center for Technology Transfer, were charged with overhauling the office. They essentially flipped the philosophy from waiting for discoveries to come to the center to more proactively seeking out inventions and educating faculty and researchers on the commercial possibilities of their work.

Dr. Gabriel's plan was to make commercialization "simple, clear, fair and fast," she said, "Although it would be nice if the university broke even, it really isn't the university's mission."

The rehab included simplifying the path to licensing technology, particularly for faculty members who were looking to commercialize their discoveries. Dr. Gabriel said the streamlining downsized the licensing process from as long as a year to as soon as six weeks.

By several accounts, CMU's new strategy is working. Andy Hannah, chief executive officer of Harmar-based start-up Plextronics, said he licensed his firm's conductive polymer technology from CMU in six weeks time in 2002.

Pitt's Dr. Malandro said he is tackling a similar "culture shift" by restructuring the tech transfer office to focus more on the researchers. He wants to help them recognize opportunities, identify potential discoveries in the lab and develop plans with various departments.

"We're trying to reach out and grab it," he said. "That's not something that was done at the university before."