Homebrew Industrial Revolution

Looking at Kevin Carson’s latest effort. It’s pretty uneven (such as relying on John Noble for page after page to depict all modern innovation as essentially a spillover of military spending). But it does raise important issues with regard to innovation. How much of the present regulations on businesses end up supporting companies operating at massive scale, effectively keeping new companies out of the marketplace? It’s one thing to defend the public from the rapacities of large corporations; it’s another to keep the public from creating its own enterprises in deference to those same large corporations.

We can ask, what does university technology transfer serve? It would appear it has an uneasy relationship with large corporations, but has an appetite nonetheless to create substantial overhead in its licensing programs, driving it to large corporations and venture backed start ups as the only folks who have the resources to deal with them. No wonder universities are calling for gap funding–that’s the only way their licensing programs will operate, once they have forever pissed off the large corporations.

In this, one can see that licensing–a permitting process for money–is the essential feature of university implementations of technology transfer. It’s an absurd limitation, and only starts to sound reasonable if one hangs out with bureaukleptic AUTM folks too long.

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One Response to Homebrew Industrial Revolution

  1. Kevin Carson says:

    Thanks, Gerry. I probably shouldn’t have made such heavy use of one source for stylistic reasons, but my actual argument from Noble (as I intended to put it across, anyway) was simply that the *direction* of technical innovation was driven to a large extent by the state.

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