It just doesn't get any better…

University technology transfer programs now routinely advocate for policies under which the university claims ownership of inventions made by faculty and staff, and sometimes students, visiting scholars, and volunteers.  These policies then hand control of these inventions to the university patent licensing office.  There, most inventions die, casualties of patent accumulation, portfolio thinking, lack of resources, narrow operating models, and regulatory overhead.

It’s not like every invention would reach practical application anyway.  Inventiveness does not mean practicality, economy, competitive timing, or imaginative interest.  One invention may be made obsolete by another.  There are many reasons why an invention might not be fully developed.  The idea that there are inventions “just sitting on shelves” at universities is pretty goofy.  Are inventions like dead parrots, pining for the fjords? No, what the compulsory system does is add one more thing, and a big thing at that, into the mix to prevent anyone from finding out just why research inventions aren’t going anywhere.  That is, the compulsory system displaces really useful knowledge about investment and markets and technology with really rotten knowledge about triage and committees of experts and inattention and lack of capability in a technology transfer program.

It is difficult to explain the extent of damage that a compulsory system does to learning about where innovation may be possible.   Rather than learning from attempts, a compulsory system leads people to avoid mistakes, to cover over information with rationalizations and justifications.  This is done because institutions cannot afford to look bad, and in a compulsory system, messing up means liability and loss of reputation.  Annual reports from university technology transfer offices don’t list the inventions that didn’t receive attention nor the ones for which a deal failed, nor the reasons for any of this.  That is, university technology transfer annual reports efface the really important information that would help an innovation ecosystem to recognize, learn, and adapt.

And it is certainly not the case that the university compulsory patent accumulation model can be “improved”.  Adding more compulsoriness, for instance, like patent administrators are trying to do now, won’t make the model work any “better”.  Adding more requirements to assign to “close loopholes” will just take even more inventions away in carts to their deaths.  Rationalized efforts like rewritten and expanded policies, more committees, reorganization of the office, and re-packaging for “commercialization” rather than “transfer” cannot possibly undo the damage of a compulsory institutional approach or make it “better”.

How about hiring “better” people into a compulsory system?  Like, people with “industry experience”?  Is there any indication that “industry” has a great track record recently in dealing with research innovation?   As Jim Collins has it at the top of the cover in Good to Great and the Social Sectors, “business thinking is not the answer.”

The pathway to research-catalyzed innovation lies with freedom, choice, and access to resources.  A university technology transfer office that adopts these conditions has the benefit of working with people who have chosen them.  This in turn leads to better working relationships, greater selectivity for inventions that match office expertise and resources, and much greater capacity to attempt things that do not work out.

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