Joan Roelofs’s Foundations and Public Policy: The Masks of Pluralism provides a critique of superficial consensus building. The basics are to capture passionate outliers, make them dependent for funding, and eventually lead them to conform to a consensus rallied around pre-set policy goals. Essentially one seeks to replace passion with abstraction, deliberation with acclamation, and run based on “data” from studies rather than any understanding that might arise from experience. Nomothetic, not idiographic. Life should imitate policy.
Now, entrepreneurship and innovation run counter to all this. That’s an interesting thing. That policy planning can work at cross purposes to on-the-ground recognition. The innovation that the status quo contemplates is what it is capable of self-proposing. And what the status quo tends to self-propose will be socially invariant. That is, the consensus has a really difficult time self-proposing something that changes anything, really. Certainly not the relative positions of those forming the consensus, much as they may clamor for such a change.
One might think that a consensus formed by wordsmithing and generalization is not the same as that formed by independent recognition of mutual interests or a willingness to leave enough alone. Thus, is it possible to have “innovation planning” or “planning for economic development” that is really *transformative*? If the status quo, the consensus, the majority of experts all get to a decision on what to fund, and how to manage the results, are we really anywhere near something transformative? Perhaps, but I’m not betting on it.
This is where Renee is right. The inventor is privileged to have passion for something. This does not mean: overly grand expectations of wealth and fame. This does not mean: wasteful enthusiasm without competence or experience. This does not mean: ego blocking all efforts to assist. Passion, here, means a willingness to endure to achieve a result. To go after it with career on the line, with a keen sense of the hard work to be done to make a go of it, with a persistence that’s not daunted but also is not clueless.
No tech transfer office built on a process or institutional ownership basis can live up to the passion of the inventor, or the inventing team. One’s ownership of patent rights cannot own the energy of the group, its tacit knowledge, its sense of opportunity, its passion. And if one is not able to participate in that passion, then one is a dead weight on it, hauling it back to a consensus, full of diligence, fairness, compliance, consistency, and administrative reality. As Hayak would have it, the central planner can never adequately anticipate the life of the individual. In this, the individual falls away. And in the world of inventing–regardless of the patent side of things–passion is a key attribute that runs alongside invention. Invention without it–who cares? Invention in which it is deliberately stripped away by policy–worse.
The starting point for innovation “management” by universities is to keep anyone out of it that hasn’t got something to contribute with passion. Not a pretend thing, but authentically, expertly, and focusedly. Another way the growth of university technology transfer as a process-bound, policy-dictated, duty-forced, systematic activity degrades if not destroys the very thing it claims has value.