Karen White over at Almost White Pages has good thoughts about the challenges of providing university inventors with choices about who manages their inventions. It’s clear this is not an easy issue, and I agree with Karen that it is worth exploring, and for that it is worth having the discussion.
Unfortunately, most university tech transfer employees simply cannot speak out on the matter, other than to recite the talking points established by AUTM, Stanford, WARF, and MIT. I’m not quite sure why these organizations should have so much desire to suppress public discussion, especially after their unfortunate–and ultimately losing–role in Stanford v Roche. Haven’t we had enough of the AUTM-Stanford-WARF-MIT way of doing things? Can’t we even have the conversation without being shouted down by these folks?
I would think so. I am of course up for the discussion, as I have been for years.But folks who ought to be leaders of this discussion don’t want to have it. Lita Nelson at MIT says “There is no evidence that anyone has that this would work, and there’s a great deal of evidence that it won’t work.” Well, Lita, with respect, you are wrong. University tech transfer worked for nearly a hundred years with faculty-agent-choice. It was the model that Cottrell started with Research Corporation in 1912 (happy centennial, RC). It is the model on which WARF is based. It is the model that Vannevar Bush pushed in Science the Endless Frontier. It served as a model for the formation of the National Science Foundation. It is baked into the Bayh-Dole Act, as you and others found out when the Supreme Court worked through the law and explained to you how it operates. The very basis of Bayh-Dole was in the success of the faculty-agent-choice model. Bayh-Dole instructs federal agencies to allow that model more room to operate. The evidence for the faculty-agent-choice model is everywhere.
Instead, what we have got is administrative exploitation of that freedom of choice to make compulsory institutional claims–and then claim there is no evidence that any other way could possibly work. Really, now.
We are going to have the discussion anyway. That’s a good thing for universities, for research, for collaboration, for Bayh-Dole (despite Sen Bayh’s objections), and for innovation.