Metrics of "technology untransfer"

Stuff arising in research is hardly technology.  Research deals in glimmers and epiphanies, arguable discovery and hypothesis, data and more data, theory formation and creative destruction of theory.   In all this, research inventions are not, generally, technology, and transfer does not take place by licensing, though transfer can be prevented if there isn’t licensing, once one has gone done fool and got patents to exclude others from practicing.

Illustration:  one can license patent rights for an invention on which no further work is done.  The technology is never transferred, merely a right to exclude others from practicing.  Any money arising from the license is arbitrage money, not transfer money.  No benefit to the public.  But you won’t find a single university that separates out such licensing activity.

A better measure of *transfer* of a university licensing office is not properties of what is licensed (like income), but what is claimed as to ownership and unlicensed.   A metric might be the median age in the office of unlicensed inventions.   That would be a good proxy for the effect of university policy in disrupting the inclusion of research invention in the formation of technology.

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