The NYT article misses the real story: the lesson being taught to these students is that solving a social problem and trying to help people in developing countries is an opportunity to make money. Lets recap. The professor set an assignment that students create a design that would solve a social problem. The students wanted to help reduce environmental degradation and to help people in developing countries build their own houses. They produced one design for their assignment. They weren't happy with it so they continued working on it. Their motivation for continuing working on the problem? It seems their motivation was to solve an interesting design challenge and to help people in the developing world. They weren't motivated in this instance by a desire to make money, and they certainly weren't motivated by a desire to make money for the universities technology transfer office. The lesson they have learned; the desire to help people and solve social problems can be exploited to make money. I've explained how this makes the idea unlikely to be used in a blogpost http://aliquidnovi.org/?p=160