It's a fairly natural outgrowth of the pressure (since 80s) to run (public) universities "more like a business". Funding was cut and restructured, a professional class of management moved in, and universities were encourages/mandated to look for new sources of revenue. One of the common variants of this was to develop fairly aggressive "technology transfer" offices. The idea being that IP was being developed, but not monetized. It hasn't been super successful, for a bunch of reasons.