So the NAS apparently doesn’t really care about technology transfer and writes a perfunctory report to that effect. One might think after reading, say Science the Endless Frontier, that the whole point of public funding for research is in the outcomes. Not the research deliverables to the government, not the number of patents issued, not the training of more future investigators to beg their living from the government, and not the pork-like spending of the research treasure at institution A not institution B. Nor is public funding primarily intended as a way to show off one’s status within the research community.
Having set aside the standard reasons to write a perfunctory report, what outcomes could possibly be expected?
How about “Money from patents!” or “Public benefit = money to universities!” That’s “commercialization”! Okay, that happens once a decade at one out of ten universities. Let’s say that’s not a very interesting outcome.Sorry about that, AUTM.
Let’s say that outcomes that matter take the form of discovery that enables new capabilities in community, and those new capabilities change what we can do, what we make, what we want, how we live, how we work.
In Vannevar Bush’s development of the idea, there’s no direct, required connection between research and these outcomes. There’s no demand that government tell university faculty what to study, or that it would be just dreamy if university bureaucrats took ownership of everything inventive. In that, Bayh-Dole is not so much inspired as a serviceable patch over a bureaucratic desire.
In Vannevar Bush’s development there is no direct connection between university research and industry. In Bush, there is no linear model. No basic research to applied research to development to products. That’s bureaucratic invention that we all live with like a dead raccoon in the corner of the kitchen.
Technology transfer doesn’t even show up. Certainly not the processified model of patent accumulation until there’s something to shake down industry with that so many university technology transfer offices use. So we might say, ah, technology transfer means progress in thinking about how to get research into practice. Or, we might say, bah, technology transfer just created a bozonet of folks trying to serve up the dead raccoon to the public. We might ask, is “technology transfer” an essential function?
Let’s say for the moment that Bush was on to something. That his account was not defective because it left out a primary role for bureaucracy, but rather that it was insightful because innovation of this sort does not so often work well with pre-set processes. Bush does not imagine the role of university research to make industry more efficient or to feed the status quo. Bush does not imagine the university role to license patents to monopolists. These things, of course, are possible. But none are required. And for that matter, how interesting do these sound? Would you make them the centerpiece of a national innovation policy?
It is all too easy to fixate on a model as truth. Then dealing with industry becomes a matter of “principles” (as it is represented in the UC system). Policy can be drafted for compliance and efficiency. Simple process diagrams can be created. Folks who believe diagrams can be hired. Faculty can be trained by these simple folks, and threatened with retraining if not ethics violations if they pull some fool faculty thing and try to reason it out. Innovation is a process by which university bureaucrats make money licensing patent rights to monopolists. Doesn’t the dead raccoon smell good?
Technology transfer offices at universities are obvious only if one buys into the linear model as truth. If one realizes it’s the superficial product of an MIT economist trying to make sense of categories in early reports devised by the NSF to try to report to Congress what it is doing with its money, then, well, one might have a different view.
Imagine a world without the linear model. It’s easy if you try. Then what?
Unfixing a model does not unfix truth. But it may get past unreflective alliance to a heuristic. It certainly gets past the confidence that bureaucratic totaltarianism is more efficient than individual liberties, which is, of course, the AUTM argument in Stanford v. Roche. The truth is still out there. It just takes actual effort to get at it.
All this is beyond the bozonet. Why complicate the simplistic? Why threaten one’s well paying job with being reflective? Why not just say, business thinking is so much better than any other sort of thinking, even when business thinking is so poorly suited to anything like research or innovation.
Imagine, if you will, that research is personal activity and choice. It aims for discovery on the edge of knowledge, of the unexpected. The expertise is on the edges, not in central administration. Certainly not in technology transfer offices, those little mortuaries run by soft-eyed folks where university inventions now go to die their tiny, useless deaths. Imagine if you will the networks of personal and organizational relationship by which ideas move about and motivate inquiry.
If we look at patent management in university research over the past 100 years, we see a movement from inventions being on the edge of the totally cool to their accumulation in bureaucratic processes. What has changed is the confidence of the claims for process and efficiency, masked by “success stories” in annual reports. This, progress? Hmpff.
In Bush, development of new stuff is undifferentiated. There is research and discovery, directed from the edges, supported by government funds. The outcomes lead to community opportunity, reflected in changed lives, new products, industry jobs, security, and health. The mechanisms are unspecified. That’s the model–leave it unspecified. Let individuals (like, say, faculty inventors) pursue the future, rather than having it handed to them by the dead, the bureaucratic, and the dreadful oversight committee. Then, later, we have folks proposing a model (linear! simple!), and then a delayed rush of bureaucratic types determined to prove the models right (success stories! policy! compliance!), make them efficient, call them truth. That’s the effect, not the intention, perhaps, of Bayh-Dole. It has given life to a bureaucratic, compulsory, processified model of technology transfer. Well now.
We might then ask whether the primary issue facing university “technology transfer” is how to unravel it as a bureaucratic, compulsory system with a fixation on commercialization and restore a broader range of efforts by which research work connects with community life. In this, it may be that community life infusing research is more important than, say, bureaucrats working to have the right to finger every inventive thing to ensure they get a piece of the action, or ensure that there will be no action.
Am I harsh? No. I have edited out the harsh paragraphs. Why does the simplistic, ineffectual, hopelessly dull linear model persist? Why isn’t that a subject of an NAS study?