If you look at the list of purposes of the Bayh-Dole Act at 35 USC 200, you will find these elements:
Use the patent system to
promote the utilization of federally supported inventions
encourage maximum participation of small business firms in federally supported research and development
promote collaboration between commercial concerns and nonprofits
ensure that inventions are used to promote free competition and enterprise without unduly encumbering future research
promote commercialization and public availability of inventions made in US with US labor
ensure Government gets sufficient rights in federally supported inventions to meet its needs and protect public against nonuse and unreasonable use
minimize the costs of administrating policies in this area
I count 10 (boldfaced) purposes, and “commercialization” is only one of these, and only then balanced with “public availability” and qualified by US manufacture.
I do not see AUTM keeping any metrics on the use of inventions or the number of small firms participating in research as a result of Bayh-Dole. I don’t see this in rags like Technology Transfer Tactics that happily amplify every icky monetizing urge (sorry, guys). I don’t see these in all those seminars on how to do butt kicking audits of your likely cheating licensees. I don’t see any count of the number or scale of university collaborations with industry. I don’t see any success stories directed at promoting “free competition.” (Though I do hear folks continue to deride non-exclusive licensing as “just a tax”–ignoring the fact that a license and charging money for it are utterly distinct). Same for public availability of inventions. Wow. Are you jaded, going yeah-yeah, but we’re over that? Or has your tech transfer function been so totally degraded into gollumness that you have only a taste for rings (and a bit of finger)? Just putting some dramatic teeth in it, so to speak, because we have to suffer through so much banal prose every day.
The fact is, “commercialization” is only one piece of the purposes of Bayh-Dole. Why has the university technology transfer community fallen then into the thrall of the idea that it is the only purpose, or the most important purpose, or the only one they will spend any time at? Isn’t it a travesty of sorts, that the non-profit research community has allowed its work to be overrun by an importation of independent inventor and invention broker mind sets, language, and practices so that nearly every university TTO has a statement on process like this (chosen at random) to promote commercialization?
Again, getting way broader than “commercialization” is something the non-profit community ought to have worked on from day one of Bayh-Dole. A patent has strategic advantages quite other than being a royalty generating engine in a product play. It can help to organize a standard, it can manage quality control, it can help choose first adopters, it can stand for a portion of due diligence on provenance, it is identifiable as a coherent asset generated by a lab, it can rally small companies to a platform, and it can open up access to portfolios held by others through cross licensing. These are all important aspects of a conversion of research artifacts to tools. The first order success in technology transfer is that another organization is using a research finding as a tool in its own work, whether that’s research with, or internal ops, or demonstration of what not to do. In short, open source can be a critical step in the business development of the research, the university, and ultimately of product arising from collaborative libraries arising from tools arising from artifacts. Just that your patents have a different role, and you make your money, if that’s the metric, a different way, and in the end, your office has a different role, if it wants it.
It may be your organization is too deeply entrenched–that the financial model requires big hits to pay for losers, that all your training is set up for commercialization not collaboration or public availability, or the licensing database won’t accept fields that cover non-license uses, or that you don’t get evaluated on how many companies are using an invention. Okay–so the policy and senior admin folks have set you up to be narrow, told you that your only way to job survival is by making more and more money from licensing, and you hear the repeated cries of the professional patent assertors saying you are patsies for not knowing how to put the screws to industry to get the full value of your IP, and you know that there’s just enough of your own tough crowd of privately very unpleasant university inventors who totally believe those cries and are willing to deride you every chance they get. Doesn’t it make you feel trapped in an absurd obsession not of your own making? What is and should never be?