Have been looking at a new collection of essays edited by Leroy Searle, “The Natural History of Reading”. Searle makes a general claim: “we do not start, in reading, at the ‘beginning,’ but at a particular point in a history of reception.” We are in media res, working from the ever-present thick of things out towards arguable starting points upon reflection and apparent objectives, both near and distant, to which we might aspire.
Technology transfer, IP management, innovation–these are activities that are all about reading. By reading we don’t mean just words on a page, gulped into a grammatical smoothie. We are talking about observation, recognition of pattern and relationship, forming interpretation that leads to action. It’s what an American (or Canadian) football quarterback does in evaluating a defense, and what wide receivers are doing at the same time.
If this is the case, then the *assertion* made by the Linear Model is that things start at the beginning rather than in the middle. That somehow, things start with basic research in isolation, and then gradually it dawns on folks that things might have a use, then pow! there are patents on inventions, licenses, and economic vitality. In the little linear model that university technology transfer offices nearly uniformly put out (no, it’s not a monoculture, sigh) says that everything starts with the invention disclosure, then an assessment for monopoly position relative to markets willing to pay, and from there it’s an effort to license for an upside “in the public interest”. That is, the public wants us to make money on this stuff. Or something like that.
If we expect that when we interpret we typically find ourselves in the middle of things, with competing histories and competing futures, then the Linear Model and its devil underling the little linear model come off as heuristics gone bad. They simplify an account *after the fact*. The mistake is to think they are any guide to practice. It is the difference between telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end, and finding oneself in the midst of one, and taking a local action to figure out how the story might be working. University IP policy and practice comes to be defined by the effort to enforce this model on research and innovation practice. Nomothetic. Process-bound. Management myth. However one wants to put it. Life is forced to imitate art, and not very good art at that.