There is a simple IP policy no university will implement:
It is our policy to take no position on any IP arising in the university unless the university commissions its creation or the proprietors of the IP request our involvement.
For one thing, such a policy is too short. IP policies need to run to at least a page to evidence heft and seriousness, and to make enough bad choices in phrasing that there is a continuing role for administrators and oversight committees to work on trying to fix things.
Here is another IP policy gesture:
It is our policy to support creative insights when they intermittently arise, with the resources we have available at the time, as best we can, and to do those things that contribute to an environment in which the intermittency of discovery is recognized and valued.
Urk! no one would do that! Management is about just the opposite–regularity, volume business, process, efficiency. Management is about supervision and being the head not the durn hands, compliance and consistency, and making stuff so stupidly easy technicians in fear of the jobs can be made to do it, even if that means turning the activity itself into something so stupid that even management can understand it!
The idea of IP “management” simply cannot get away from the desire for regularity, process. Compound that with “policy”. The Idea of Order at Key West. It’s just that innovation, for all the focus and discipline and coordination that it takes to make anything new happen, doesn’t thrive in a bureaucratic fishbowl of regular, process-bound anything.
We are playing for the rare event. The insight or discovery or epiphany or development that matters is outside the mainstream. It is outside the volume reports, even of insights and discoveries and epiphanies and developments. It is not typical. It does not conform to what makes work tractable for administrators. It does not benefit from fairness or the assumption that everything should be treated the same until a triage sheet shows it to be different, and then to have a policy applied that in all pragmatism asks people to treat their insights as if they are typical. Fill out this form. Oh gosh, how far folks have fallen in their quest to “manage” research IP. Time to apply unmanagement ointment to the swollen portfolios in university offices. Doing so will create shining, intermittent opportunity. And bureaukleptic IP management darkness will comprehend it not.