Brian Baird (Washington 3d District) made some important contributions to the House Science and Technology subcommittee hearings last Thursday. His challenge for university research is that bright people too often end up doing meaningless things.
Baird asks, “Isn’t there a reward structure for innovation in academia?”
That’s the crux of it. A share of royalties from inventions that get licensed only 1% of the time for significant income isn’t a meaningful academic reward structure for innovation. First, the licensing frequency is an order of magnitude too low. Second, it does not differentiate between patent arbitrage (making money by flipping a patent right) and innovation (adopting and using new technology). Third, making money isn’t an academic reward–it’s set up on the side and isn’t recognized in promotion and tenure, and isn’t reflected in things like extension, sabbatical, and other structures to promote faculty engagement with community.
It’s not a flaw of Bayh-Dole that it doesn’t require universities to be creative, do the right thing, and not focus on the most self-serving bottom line fixation on flipping patent rights. So Baird has it right–time to ask for some accounting from the faculty directly for what they are doing with the opportunity–by-pass the administrative bozonet. Isn’t the present economic crisis and the repeated calls for innovation enough for folks to see it’s not business as usual any more?
That’s the challenge with innovation. Something innovative often points up problems elsewhere in a value chain that prevents the innovation’s benefits from being realized.