OStatic

Google has given Oregon State University's Open Source Lab $300,000, following a previous gift the company gave of $450,000. The gifts have come under the wing of the Campaign for OSU--an effort to raise funds for the university's research and other projects. Can companies like Google and Microsoft benefit themselves from this kind of gift-giving?

While the many gifts and donations that Microsoft has given universities over the years have caused some critics to call the efforts "good PR and a huge tax write-off," there have been numerous examples of Microsoft-funded university-level research coming back to benefit Microsoft. I've been to the Microsoft Research Labs many times, and it has produced many products that have gone on to success for the company. The people who work there are almost all from hard-core academic backgrounds--not business folks. In many cases, the research these eggheads were doing at universities got funded by Microsoft before the researchers jumped over to the company.

Beyond that kind of example of synergy between universities and a big corporation, there is also promise for investment in the efforts of application developers, including--and maybe especially--open source developers. Apple has a $100 million fund to seed applications for the iPhone, and RIM, which competes with the iPhone, has a similar $150 million fund. Google's gifts to Oregon State University have been small ones, but there is room for lots of out-of-the-box thinking about how big tech companies can fund grassroots and academic efforts to innovate.

• Microsoft
• google