The Tour de France finished up at the end of July. The strategies of bicycle racing help to illustrate the practical nature of competition. In bicycle racing, there’s a mechanical advantage in being behind another racer. Trailing racers move into the slipstream of the lead, where there is lower pressure. Even better if there’s a whole pack of riders. See this simple discussion.
In a distance bicycle race, therefore, it takes a lot of work to breakaway from the main group (called the “pelaton“). One is doing all the work. More typically, a small group of riders will break away. Then, to keep their lead, they have to work together, sharing the lead position for the rest. The leader doesn’t want to stay out in front all the time–he will wear out and have to fall back to the pelaton. You can see that to maintain a separation advantage, there has to be local cooperation to overcome the huge advantage, over long distances, of riding in a big pack.
Similarly for groups that separate later to chase the lead group. These chase groups also must cooperate to catch up with the leaders and stay ahead of the pelaton. There is a politics of cooperation and competition throughout.
As the leaders close in on the finish, they know that they are positioning for all-out competition with one another. They know this when they break away together, when they cooperate to share the lead to distribute the work load to maintain their position. They know at some point they will challenge each other. But they have scores of kilometers of cooperation to create a battle among themselves for the last two or three.
This is a valuable pattern to consider in technology competition as well. While there is no slipstream, we can consider analogs. We can recognize that there are times we it saves resources to be working with other organizations to get something done over trying to do everything oneself. In cooperation, we might find that we can write *smaller budgets* for local research.
One might find that the really interesting metric for university research is not how much money total a university has managed to grab away from others, but rather how well it is able to write lower expenditure budgets to accomplish in partnerships what other universities have to build all on their own. One might call it an ego-bloat. But how does one get at this without slipping into a boring argument about generic waste and inefficiency, which ends up in more compliance overhead like forcing for-show bidding environments for procurement and more paperwork to authorize travel. Sigh.
In the effort to create transformation from research technology, there is a tremendously important role played by commons. That is, by shared technology development without immediate cost accounting and proprietary positions. What is most important is keeping all energy directed at establishing and developing the new position. Anything that steals energy is uncooperative and ruins the work for everyone.
With regards to the PARC Dilemma, there’s an ancillary issue and that is the challenge faced by an industry research team in getting anything it is developing into product. The marketing department is not necessarily willing to take a chance on just anything that comes out of research. The higher value the existing product lines, the more difficult the transition from lab to marketing. Even new work that would create viable new product lines won’t make the cut if the resources to do this are pulled from efforts to maintain existing flagship products’ market share. Why spend $50m to develop a new product with a little, but profitable, market when that same $50m spent in advertising might contribute another $1b to the bottom line?
It’s hard to get anything new from industry lab to industry product within the host company. That’s my sense of it. And it’s even more difficult if a university attaches patent conditions to some inventive artifact introduced in the the industry lab. If you can’t get it out easily anyway, it’s going to be a lot harder if there are more bothersome strings attached. It’s not that the research labs don’t want to pay–perhaps they don’t–but it doesn’t matter. The real problem is that if they have to track the university requirements as well, it’s a losing proposition.
It is hard enough to hit the fastball. It’s harder still with a fly on your forehead. That’s what most university patent licensing in the research pack means for industry labs.
In technology development, transformational changes used to take a generation. The idea of using the patent system to promote use presumes changes in less than 20 years. But even in a decade of work, it may be that 95% of the time, collaboration is critical. This has nothing to do with being fluffy and getting to yes, oh, yes, yes, yes… It has to do with the clear-headed sense of how new technology platforms takes on the status quo. It also illustrates how the status quo slurps a huge amount of resource to keep its position. The status quo makes it all the more difficult to maintain even a skew position. All the benefits are for working in the status quo.
Universities have huge stakes in the status quo. They are involved in workforce development–training for the careers that are available within industry. They cultivate strategic relationships with market leaders–companies who donate to university programs, who hire graduates, who sponsor research, and who carry weight in political lobbying for university funding. As one university development officer told me, “we really don’t do much with small companies”. One can see why.
But transformational research is not really about entrenching or servicing or offering gifts to the status quo. That’s what makes a lot of drug discovery and testing socially important for universities to be doing, but not really particularly interesting from the perspective of transformational innovation. A lot of drug work involves turning an acute condition into a chronic one. That’s the sweet money position. The pharma infrastructure is set up for this. The drug discovery effort is largely business invariant. It preserves the whole product delivery infrastructure, just refreshes the inputs. Sophisticated, elite, moneyed. You gotta play there. It’s the best of the industrial status quo, and also perfectly rigged for a few patents setting up billion dollar monopoly positions.
One can see why university patent administrators would be attracted to this arena. One has to wonder, however, why anyone would try to extend this approach to any other areas unless there was a strong indication that the approach matched the situation.
In the vast majority of university research areas, it would appear that cooperation over many years is indicated, and monopoly positions are something for the very end when competitors sort each other up. The university research role is to be out ahead of the status quo, the peloton, where the work is a lot more difficult. But in that research, the university position has to be cooperative with the labs doing the same thing in industry, in government, at independent research organizations, and among non-institutional practitioners.
It is this kind of development that shifts attention from monopoly products as the index of university patent administration success to the role of patents, and other IP, and other NIPIA, in weaving together lead groups and chase groups dedicated to transformational new platforms. That’s what we should be evaluating. That’s where the university metrics for management should be. That’s what makes university research critical to national social and economic goals. The rest of it is still worthy, but it is just for fun.