I helped invent the smartphone camera. It could have died in the lab

Dr. Eric Fossum is the John H. Krehbiel Sr. Professor for Emerging Technologies, Director of the PhD Innovation Program, and Vice Provost for Industry Partnerships for Innovation and Education at Dartmouth College. He is also a member of the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Every time you snap a photo with your smartphone, you’re using technology that almost didn’t make it out of the laboratory.

While working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in the 1990s, I led the development of the “camera-on-a-chip” — a breakthrough that replaced bulky camera components with a tiny semiconductor image sensor. Today, the technology my team and I pioneered — known as the complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensor — powers the cameras in smartphones, laptops, autonomous vehicles, and countless other products. Roughly seven billion CMOS image sensors are now produced each year.

But inventing the camera-on-a-chip was only the beginning. Turning a government-funded technical advance into a product used by billions required something just as important — a way to move that technology from the laboratory into the marketplace.

That’s what Congress sought to provide when it passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. By allowing universities, research laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and small businesses to retain patent rights to inventions arising from federally funded research, the law created a framework for technology transfer that has helped turn countless discoveries into........

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