I have been thinking about how university technology transfer is depicted, versus how it actually happens. The depictions are something of a prophetic hope–inventions reported to the university’s licensing office will be evaluated for “commercial potential” and those that look promising will be acquired, patented, and marketed to companies to develop into beneficial products. A win for the public, for industry, and for the university and its inventors (in the form of royalties and prestige). It sounds wonderful, but practice does not follow the prophecy, and there’s a big problem with that–repeating the wonderful depiction in the absence of practice is disingenuous, even false, even fraud. It’s not even just putting a positive spin on things. It’s just not what happens.
Universities expanded their patent policies from voluntary reporting and assignment to compulsory assignment of inventions. They expanded the scope of what is to be reported from patentable inventions made in the course of their official duties to anything a licensing officer describes as inventive even if not patentable made within the field of an inventor’s professional expertise. That expansion means university licensing offices claim an awful lot of stuff that they cannot possibly deal with. This, in turn, means that the most frequent outcome of a university taking ownership of an “invention” is that nothing, nothing ever happens. If this were a Talking Heads song, then it would be “Heaven.” But that heaven, described, is a sort of undesirable hell.
Consider the possible outcomes. Here’s a sketch of what typically happens. No one keeps records to document all this, but from twenty years in the technology transfer world, here’s something to start with, going from most frequent to less frequent, if not rare. Continue reading