Howard E. McCurdy has a fascinating comment on the life cycle of bureaus, with particular reference to NASA. The article is available in pdf if you have an institutional affiliation with an academic institution. McCurdy builds on work by Anthony Downs, who argues that bureaus tend toward increasing bureaucracy and conservative behaviors. Surprise, surprise. We don’t really expect a bureaucracy to become a hotbed of creativity. Sort of counter to expectations.
As a new bureau’s growth and initiatives slow down and its administration settles in, those with ambition move elsewhere and those that stay tend to conform to the status quo. There goes creativity and innovation. One might add, the conservers of such offices tend to preserve the rhetoric of the office’s formation, even while rebuilding it as a matter of consistency, compliance, and avoidance of risk. Thus, the rhetoric of innovation and discovery can persist long after all the life juices have evaporated.
We can ask if university technology transfer offices are in line for this same problem. The old guard have established their positions of responsibility, a standard model with increasing sophistication has been put in place, the market for technology transfer folks has stabilized, and folks who want advancement have slipped into the private sector, leaving some entry level positions.
In the case of NASA, early on the agency was built with engineering and scientific expertise. Over time, professional administrators came to dominate, so that while there continued to be advancement opportunities for the administrators, this was not nearly so much the case for scientists and engineers, who had to seek advancement elsewhere. So the agency sheds its talent best positioned to take on new responsibility while creating advancement opportunities for the folks who can organize but lack the domain knowledge to know what they are trying to organize.
I’m sure there’s an entire profession devoted to appearing to manage when clueless. Lots of meetings and slavish lip-service to whatever goals anyone in power mentions. Govern by fear and loathing. Seen that often enough. A sign of the bozonet at work.
We might then expect that as “technology transfer” becomes officified, it will become more conservative, will age, and will be less amenable to creative initiatives. We see this already at work in the making up of AUTM, with those pulling the strings maintaining a 30 year old rhetoric regarding the role of patent licensing, even as it is increasingly clear that their work reduces to “make patents make money” any which way you can. It’s a model that’s not creative, not flexible, not experimental, and not much into re-creating itself for changing circumstances.
Will university technology transfer offices follow in these footsteps. I think so. University IP policies are increasingly uniform, increasingly dull, increasingly corporate. AUTM advocates for invent-for-hire, to save the inconvenience of dealing with loathsome research inventors. A bunch of universities have recently signed on [scroll down for the archived text] with AUTM on this point. I’m sure none of them asked their faculty to comment. It’s strictly an administrators’ hayride, in keeping with offices coming to be controlled by the professional administrators. Why let talent lead when you can make it work for you?
Yet we find that this model of corporate invention ownership, which is “accumulate because you can”, doesn’t promote innovation particularly well, and when it does, it appears that bureauklepticism works against the host company. And as universities implement their own version of it, they will find the same is true–they will drive the really good work out of the university.
Perhaps in the end that will be a good thing, but it won’t be what these increasingly calcified, barnacle offices were wanting. At the outset, they expected to change the world in league with research inventors and company investors. Now they want to make money on rights–patent arbitrage. If folks want research to create innovation that creates jobs, they are a long, long way away from it watching AUTM and its members become increasingly conservative, inflexible, and anti-inventor.