What are the pressing issues facing university “technology transfer”? If we start with how to encourage a rich engagement between research inquiry and the broader community, we are at the nub of it. The particular variety of engagement called technology transfer also has lots of variations, and the fact that there are variations will no doubt bother some people. The kind of technology transfer that’s primarily outbound from inquiry to the rest of the world is the focus of most public policy on innovation, and within outbound technology transfer, folks introduce intellectual property and especially patents–and therefore licensing. Folks don’t spend much time on such stuff as technology instruction or demonstration and follow-on collaboration.
For the commercialization crowd, a licensing a patent monopoly is so much more fun than, say, creating incentives for first-in competitive, non-exclusive access. Oddly, one might think that a twenty-year patent monopoly might actually relax the intensity to get something done sooner rather than later, while first in requires a race to get something into play, and build out from there.
This preamble highlights once again how unbelievably narrow it is to accumulate patents to push for exclusive commercialization licensing, especially given the range of other responses available to help publicly funded university research benefit the public. There is a role for patent licensing, even exclusive patent licensing. And that role can even be a worthy one. But that worthiness does not extend to trashing the broad array of other approaches to university technology transfer.
Unfortunately, trashing other approaches to technology transfer is just what the AUTMites are doing. No one holds them accountable. And certainly, in their rush to the exclusively licensed patent trough, they are not going to exercise self-restraint or, say, introspection. It’s political, it’s their careers, and it’s the thrall of a belief system that has been marked out patent monopolies as an unqualified public good. Bayh-Dole, so the rhetoric goes, is perfect; licensing patents for money is a public good (and natch, impossible to be “sub-optimal”); and everyone who pursues other approaches is ignorant, bitter, uninformed, greedy, and working for badness.
I’m not making this up. Read the BizWeek editorial, or the BNA article, or the letter to the Department of Commerce [or AUTM’s position statement on “free agency”], or the multiple amicus briefs in Stanford v. Roche. It’s a consistent line. Anti-faculty, anti-inventor, anti-discussion, anti-new-ideas.
The most pressing issue facing university technology transfer is how to run the patent commercialization rats out of the research ship without sinking it. No matter what the national discussion of policy–the expression of need for change or improvement; proposal of alternatives to present implementations; ideas about improvement to procurement law; efforts by scholars to get at broader intellectual property practices–the patent rats show up and shout down the discussion, distract it into the most banal dead ends, and suppress anything that might challenge their particular bit of status and belief structure. As long as the university patent commercialization rats have big seats at the table, things aren’t going to change.
What to do?
1) Defund AUTM. Universities for the most part pay for the personal memberships of technology transfer officers. It’s time for that practice to end. If you have to be a member of AUTM, pay for it yourself. If the membership isn’t worth your own money, then it is pretty obvious it isn’t worth anyone’s money. There was a time when AUTM played an important role. Now AUTM is a political shill and icon to past practices. Universities do not need the current version of AUTM. So they should stop the subsidies.
2) Skip AUTM altogether and join other organizations. There are plenty of organizations out there worth folks’ time. Consider economic gardening, or other forms of economic development. Consider regional entrepreneurship and new venture organizations. Volunteer with community foundations and schools. Consider regional industry and professional organizations. You owe it to your own professional development, if nothing else, to get out more often. If you are afraid of AUTM and its tactics, and can’t risk your job or career to speak out, then do the next best thing and drop the membership. Put your personal time into something that will matter.
3) Create forums to work back to fundamentals of research engagement. Inquiry needs multiple flows of information. The incoming is as important as the outgoing. And there are things that happen in parallel where there’s no obvious flow of information at all–just recognition and encouragement–which may be more important than data for sourcing problems and insights. Finding resources for partners is as important as finding them for one’s own organization. While the bit that says “find a patent right and monopolize it” may sound incredibly attractive, try to resist taking the bait every time. See it from other perspectives for a bit, and put a little love in your heart, so to speak. The world will be a better place. Yeah.
[updated May 2017 to revise sentences in the opening paragraph and throughout; added some links; but the argument stays the same–AUTM represents inventor-loathing institutional self-interest that blocks multiple ways in which new research technology can get out for public use, shutting down discussion of alternatives to monopoly patent licensing. In this AUTM goes back to the roots of the idea, inherent in the IPA program from which Bayh-Dole was built, the university patent brokers could end-run public policy and give the pharmaceutical industry patent monopolies on compounds discovered at universities with federal support. In that, AUTM has been remarkably successful.]