In Culture and Prosperity, John Kay observes that “we work in organizations, earn as individuals, and consume as households.” A similar observation can be made of university research–faculty work in a university context, as principal investigators take on research with an expectation of personal performance, and generally build and consume resources as teams in the form of labs or centers.
University policy and practice takes a relatively dim view of this situation, however. Which is strange, since when it comes to intellectual property and industry collaboration, the program–lab, center, research project, training project–is more important than the individual or the corporate entity. It is the project that defines a research goal, generates assets, provides capstone training, becomes a going research concern. Comparatively speaking, other university units–department, college, central administrative offices like a spo or tto–are relatively dull places. Yet university policies generally interpose the spo or tto between an interested company and the lab. The contract or right is seen as more important to policy than the lab that generates it or the outcomes intended by the research.
It’s more than just a broker relationship, too. A spo or tto imposes a contractual and financial model on the form of relationship. For the spo, it’s an Industry Sponsored Research Agreement (ISRA). For the tto, it’s a patent license (#@#$). To get there, the technical contractual problem for both the spo and the tto is to push the relationship into the contractual forms that policy requires. “Training” and “compliance” become primary internal tools of control. In external interactions this push shows up as “negotiation.” It is really not negotiation. It’s more like pushing an interested company toward the policy’s preferred point of engagement. From a company perspective, this is consternating, because the exchange often looks like it should be negotiation, but it turns out to be a form of “correction” in what a spo or tto takes to be an otherwise malformed situation.
As we consider effective approaches to university-industry collaboration, we need to look at how these and other points of engagement operate. We need to ask as well how these various points of engagement inter-relate. Most importantly, we need to ask how these approaches advance projects–the “household” or going concern of university research–relative to individual and corporate activities. This all sounds like bother–complicated, political, far from the demands of today’s deals, counterintuitive and irritating to folks who want something simple.
Who wants more questions? Developing new approaches means more than constructing a census of what is and asking what looks best. This is the fallacy of “best practices” in a changing environment. The best practices that can be documented are often the established practices one is actually working against! The practices one needs may not even exist, but can be designed, or may be drawn from unexpected areas and applied in university-industry collaborations.
Research enterprise is complicated by competing issues. In drawing these out, the point is not to be surprised, but rather to emphasize how policy requirements affect in unintended ways broader contexts of interaction. The narrower the silos in which specific units work and create policy and practice, the worse their potential impact beyond their own operations. A spo that considers financial compliance as a primary charter will invariably suck energy out of creativity, opportunity, and exceptional efforts. Not that it intends to. It will look to consistency, compliance, and mitigation of risk. That’s because these are way more important to a spo than a peculiar outcome or discovery in the research. It’s a mindset that’s totally reasonable, totally defensible. That’s why it persists, is stable, and a challenge for research collaborations centered on other things altogether. Again, consistency, compliance, and mitigation of risk are not bad things–but they are also not the only things. The moment the other things are “someone else’s problem” that’s when the overall environment for research collaboration begins to break down.
What are other points of university-industry engagement? Gift funding, membership, extension, subscription, alumni, web/open, events, and job placement, undocumented collaboration, personal consulting. One may also include new ventures (for profit and non-profit). For research enterprise, we ask: how do these, along with ISRAs and #@#$s, advantage individuals, programs, and the university’s “corporate” units? If everyone in their own unit tries to get as much done as possible in their own silos, we don’t necessarily end up with coherence in an overall portfolio, nor any smarts with regard to the development of sustaining collaborations with industry (new ventures/investment, small and mid sized companies, industry leaders, industry-wide training and technology needs). We get confused noise, more like the game of Pit, with everyone shouting out their needs, claiming whatever they can harvest.
More so, we have to consider not just how each unit counts its beans–the true gruel of administrative metrics–and not just how each lab benefits by this, but also, and more importantly how each lab makes contributions that matter to a broader community, such as:
Place students in positions of industry responsibility
Refer opportunity on behalf of industry associates
Support efforts of community partners
Develop entrepreneurial opportunities
Create technology with innovation potential
Support uptake of new technology (not necessarily one’s own)
Provide research tools, data, and platforms
Stimulate the popular imagination
Teach research findings to capable audiences
It is altogether easy to say: these are nice things but not the core of university research. Which means, essentially: we are doing fine as it is, making incremental improvements as need be, no need to rock the boat or get in a panic about things, these other nice things happen if we stay focused on what we do really well, which is do research, publish, and teach. This is a decent thing to say, and it may be true. But even so (and I don’t think it is true, just to make that clear), we still haven’t got at whether current research endeavors are primarily carried by individual interests (the legacy of faculty freedoms and personal reputations) or corporate ones (the overlay of contracting policies relative to funding and rights) or something else–say, the academic freedoms and relationships established by teams, groups, projects, labs, centers, and other forms of initiative that establish an identity and forms of their own control?
While these kinds of activities can be done by individuals and by “departments”, the sweet spot may very well be the lab or project. This runs against how universities are set up for technology transfer and sponsored research, which favor the individual when it comes to inventions and research, and corporate units when it comes to money and contracts. If we were aiming to develop university industry collaboration for any of these kinds of goals, focused on projects and their outcomes, what points of engagement would be the ones to develop and use? What university research projects would respond well to the opportunity, and what ones would see any of this as distraction or worse? What point of engagement in a company would be on the other side of the collaboration? HR, research, marketing, sales, product development, senior management, dedicated university liaison, CSR?
Here, we describe the outlines of a map, acknowledge competing interests before building pathways among them. We build this map out of points of engagement, the transactions available, and the connections between transactions and benefits realized beyond the university (first); benefits realized in the lab as going concern (second); benefits realized by university as public asset (third) and benefits realized by individuals involved (also third). Putting things in this order changes where the metrics interest is, where the accountability is, and where the conflict of interest shows up (as between individual and corporate benefits).
Two questions that matter:
Should we tolerate a fight between individuals and university administration over who gets more if we’ve totally dumped on the benefits that directly advance community and the research endeavor? How much money a university makes on research or licensing means next to nothing in assessing collaboration. A big hit deal fifteen years ago. Enough funding to hire technology transfer officers without making a budget justification. A robust indirect cost pool to carry the spo. Says nothing about continuing practices, structure of the portfolio of relationships, efforts and vulnerabilities to achieve community-focused goals. How the university or individuals or labs allocate what they receive, however, says a lot about what matters in a given organization. “How have you spent?” may be more important than “How much did you receive?”
Should we tolerate a fixation on improving narrowly defined programs based on volume research and (attempted) licensing transactions at a time when many voices are calling for innovation in collaborative interfaces to reflect new realities of research, transaction, and opportunity? The genres of industry sponsored research agreement and patent license have become so well established that policy has installed these as dominant points of engagement, making it difficult to innovate in research enterprise just when we may need to most. It would be hard enough to create new protocols for engagement in a changing research landscape–it’s even worse when doing so is seen as against policy.