Maybe you already see where consideration of bozonets leads for university research asset management. Let’s take the draft bozonet framework and consider what may have happened with Bayh-Dole and university technology transfer.
Pre-BD, only a few universities operated “technology transfer” offices. After the law went into effect, there was a rapid expansion in forming offices, with many new people (including me) brought in to do work to manage IP. We came in with experience in a range of areas, but few directly in research-based innovation management, and often not with the four or five skills fluency needed to operate on all cylinders, and certainly not with the 60 subsystems for tech transfer in place and tested out. Patent attorneys knew how to get patents, and had the idea of how industry and independent inventors managed licensing for profit. Research administrators knew how to follow federal regulations and here were more, so they built out programs that paralleled their experience in sponsored research, framed by process, duty, and compliance. Investors and entrepreneurs knew about start ups and innovation and exits. Marketing managers brought how to position and sell products, even if research assets weren’t products, really. And scientists and engineers from academia and industry brought their technical training and research experience into the arena. A melting pot. Wonderful times, figuring things out.
My hypothesis is that around all this activity formed also a bozonet, sort of as a necessary shock wave. There was too much to learn too quickly with too many expectations and demands from too many different directions. It took a lot of moxy to survive in this space.
The bozonet arose to deal with the pain, the unknowing, the new vocabulary, and mostly, survival. The early bozonet patched things, spun things, and often botched it, sometimes succeeded big time, all the while preserving appearances, adding volume, and finding its own views surfacing more and more frequently as the way things really were. What if that’s what has happened, that along with the good effort we also created an early bozonet? What if the problems we have now are due to the persistence, size, and effect of this bozonet, in competition with early voices that suggested other directions and methods, and new voices that propose changes that are out of the mainstream?
The idea that I am exploring here is that in this window of rapid development, when we didn’t know as much as we’d like about how research and innovation are (and aren’t) connected, some things were put in place as patches for what wasn’t understood, and these patches got repeated to a lot of people struggling to learn how to do their new fangled jobs in technology transfer. The patches became the reality for the second generation of new hires. (That is, a generation in this field appears to be roughly 5 to 7 years). Everyone wanted to look good, most were optimistic. And it was hard to tell who was 80 percentile, who was 60 percentile, and who was 10 percentile but thought and acted as if they were 60 percentile. A regular Lake Wobegon situation, where everyone was above average.
As work developed policy writers came in to organize things, and everyone compared what they had to whatever everyone else had and copied what sounded good in a form of patchwriting, and academics came in to study how things worked in practice, reading the policies and using surveys to identify frequent responses from practitioners. How could policy writers actually work for direct experience and not get overwhelmed by the simple, engaging accounts propagated by the bozonet? How could the academics working this way separate bozonet from expert practice? For the academics, it all appears to be expert practice, perhaps, and subject to discussion on this assumption, without the need for putting a fine point on it. That is, if incompetents can’t tell their own degree of incompetence, why should non-practicing policy writers or academics doing studies be any different?
I have to be careful here, because I am making a general point about how social networks in a developing area may operate to capture, transmute, and carry inadequate practice and then have the capability to hold those inadequacies against new understandings, building them into policy, into training, and into descriptions of “best practice”. I’m not aiming to criticize anyone (though I do reserve the right to beat on bozonets for disrupting really great opportunities to get things done, and I do intend to consider how one goes after bozonet artifacts and practices and *innovates* past or despite the bozonet). In other contexts, roles are reversed and my vulnerability and self-esteem, say, would be on the line–ask me at your peril to have a professional opinion about wines, or what I think about that nifty minor scale I couldn’t recognize if I were paid to.
Let’s say that university technology transfer grew so quickly that it formed its dominant statements about how to do things in a context in which many of its practitioners did not have 10,000 hours of experience in university-based research innovation. What then? Let’s say since then, new folks coming into the practice inherit, generally, this way of doing things, supported apparently by experts who gave power point lectures and offered advice that regardless of the intent or even the trainers’ own experience was repeatedly patched and simplified by the new recruits, who came away with something rather different, and necessarily dumber, but held as important and sophisticated because no one could know any better if they didn’t know much at all to start with. The responsibility for getting it right tended to be off-loaded by reference to “expert authorities” in the form of policies or to general restatements, or to heuristics that show tidy pictures of processes leading from the lab, to patent, to license, to product, replete with explanations for why the process doesn’t work (lack of faculty training, budget shortfalls, funding gaps, and lack of innovation capacity in industry, together with nasty problems negotiating timely contracts). The deal was, you are not paid to figure it out for yourself, you are paid to make the model work, and it’s someone else’s problem if that model, or the policies, need to be adjusted.
What if the popular versions of research innovation are not much at all the way it works (and more, not the way it necessarily has to work), but rather is the way folks string together an explanation of what they expect to do out of the experiences they have had? That is, folks constructed by necessity–and perhaps quite ineptly relative to what actually is–a collective social reality that stands in for the dynamics of research based innovation. The social reality forms a grammar of survival for the bozonet, making the complex and unknown appear simple and organized, but in doing so, this also perpetuates the bozonet comfort zone against change, expertise, risk or a future unlike the present.
This is like being unable to separate opinion from data. If what “happens” is seen with the labels that have been constructed for it, then how can one tell there is “something else” that’s any deeper, complex, different from that? Doesn’t the claim for “something else” just look like opinion, or spin, or just plain weird? It’s like watching a quartet play and not accepting that people are also *counting time* even though no one can be seen doing that. In bozonet, one reasons from the properties of words to what must be happening. In bozonet, one assumes the properties one witnesses are the properties of what is happening, all the way down. In a bozonet, one assumes that logic follows history–you explain how to do the steps but have no account of why there are these steps. The world is simpler this way, but experience and expertise teach us again and again it is not the world in which we do our best work. Professional competence demands something more than simple survival.
The bozonet forms out of this soup of memory and social hazards and external circumstances. It offloads responsibility to heuristics and ubiquity, and seeks out what everyone does to shape its practice. In the bozonet, a different part of the brain lights up. Not the part that tries to figure out risk on its own, but the part that figures out how to avoid risk by playing inside what looks safe. It patches complexities with simplicities, and these in turn can preclude gaining the experience one would need to work independently of heuristics and expert pronouncements. This is ideally suited to folks tasked with managing policy, checking up on compliance, auditing services, reviewing transactions as to form, or for policy exceptions, and training in new folks to operate or participate in the “system”.
A bozonet collectively thinks much more highly of itself than is justified by its collective competence, and serves in this way as a social protection for folks wanting to survive each day and meet the expectations of the boss, if not also the job, with a feeling of self dignity and competence. The bozonet maintains memes rather than data, deals in opinion rather than experience. That is all it has to work with, and as far as it is concerned, that is the way the world is. perspective. You could practice the wrong stuff and not even know it!
The bozonet is a marker for a social network that preserves an early imprinting of how an area works, and holds present and expert practice accountable to this early standard, simplified and patched, rationalized into something almost but not quite entirely unlike tea. As such, the bozonet is unable to recognize actual experience and insight relative to opinion, and therefore is unable to imagine a future other than one that looks remarkably like the way the bozonet sees the here and now, which is largely by way of what other people in influential positions say it is, and those folks, largely, repeat what they have heard because no one really has the time these days for 10,000 hours of work before having a decent inclination of what ought to be done to cultivate research assets in support of innovation and community well being.
In assessing the effect of Bayh-Dole and the rapid rise of “technology transfer” in universities, one might say, a bozonet formed, and that this bozonet now is running in parallel with good practice, and competes with good practice, with diversification of practice, and with a deeper understanding of practice. It does this through its sheer size, ubiquity of artifacts, its choice of simple (non-)explanations to serve as patches, and its own inability to see and describe its own competence relative to the challenges and opportunities of the work.
In considering national innovation policy, or assessing the impact of Bayh-Dole, my mind turns toward the bozonet as a likely major player–a raft of expectations and social connections that can’t do anything better than hold things in place, concur in a general need to improve that involves mostly being a better bozonet, and use simplifying patch heuristics repeated over time to stand in for experience. It may be that many folks who actually practice in technology transfer offices in universities are not part of the presently extant bozonet. It may be that a bozonet may be a minority of practice, something of a well placed but incompetent oligarchy, but it persists as the mirror of practice, perpetuated in the academic literature on research innovation, accepted by management that hasn’t cared to poke at it. What if it is a bozonet that resists efforts to innovate in innovation management, and has prevented Bayh-Dole from inspiring the outcomes of research anticipated? If so, changing the law wouldn’t do a lot of good, would it?
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