Inventors are in the thick of creativity and discovery and bureaucrats are not.
Yet we find some AUTM folks these days arguing fervently for a stronger affinity with bureaucrats than with inventors. They do this even when successful inventors show up and tell them they could be doing things different, for much better outcomes. How absurd is that? It’s true that faculty inventors cannot be expected to know the full spectrum of procedures by which patents are obtained, but they don’t have to. They can work with intermediaries who do. For some reason, this idea is obvious to everyone but some of those who work in TLOs.
It is also true that university licensing officers cannot each be expected to know the full spectrum of actions by which breakthrough networks are created for innovation. It simply isn’t possible. It takes five skills at minimum, meaning very talented and committed people working for 5 or 10 years or more… and even then the experience will be necessarily limited to a few industry segments.
In the recent Bill of Rights debate, it appears that AUTM folks have got their historical documents wrong. We’re talking Bill of Rights–that is, rights for the enjoyment of life and liberty that are not ceded to central authority–not the Geneva Convention on how to treat prisoner faculty and their inventions nicely so they become docile and compliant. The debate is how better to let go, not how better to hold fast.
The moment a TLO drops compulsory assignment, admits it cannot deal in all areas, and admits that it has a lot to learn about innovation–along with the rest of us–then there’s a common ground with faculty investigators and inventors from which strategies can be developed and mutual decisions taken.
Until then, TLO policies that force actions on investigators and inventors represent a bureaucratic attack on innovation while using the language of innovation. Such a TLO is decidedly anti-faculty. Faculty are mere labor. This is wrong, and untrue, and damaging.
And so long as senior administrators permit senior administrators to do anything they wish as an exception to policy without those exceptions necessarily requiring the approval of the inventors, if not also principal investigators and sponsors, then the TLO will increasingly be seen as a place where new technology and inventor commitments to technology transfer go to die. (BTW, There are quite legal ways to avoid one’s own TLO. These are something every freedom-loving, impact-committed faculty investigator and inventor should know.)
If people want change, one place to start is a Bill of Rights that restores to faculty investigators and inventors their proper, leading place in the university research ecosystem. Even better, drop the pretense of corporate “efficiencies” in innovation and get rid of compulsory assignment, especially as a condition of employment.
Universities represent a distinctive contributor to national discovery and invention. They do this by employing faculty as free agents making commitments to the public. University administrators do not have to force such commitments. It is not university administrators that has established these commitments in the first place. Administrators are butlers, not bosses. Stewards, not kings. It’s a bitter pill, I know. This doesn’t mean that professionals working with faculty are scum. But it does mean that faculty define the function of the university. While process-loving administrators may think otherwise, doing so reduces the research distinction of university work to its non-distinctive corporate equivalent. It may be that corporate research is fine, but its approach to innovation and IP is not the university approach.
Why would universities hire licensing folks with a mandate to root out all those parts of university research that are distinctive, and impose corporate discipline, processes, and management? Why would AUTM turn into an advocate for that? Because they’ve got the Geneva Convention on the brain. It’s a crazy world, no?