It is easy to confuse focus and limitation. Focus selects valuable things from diversity, mobilizes resources, and aims to achieve a goal. Limitation cuts off consideration of opportunity from diversity and sets up rules to make things simple (or at least less complicated). University technology transfer is generally limited, not focused. I would like to see university technology transfer thrive. It won’t, until it gets this difference.
Most university technology transfer offices run with limitation, but treat it as a virtue. Much of the limitation is handed to them by the linear model, but they continue the job themselves to make the limitations of the model stick in IP policy and in their local practices.
From an invention management perspective, this is all good. Inventions are commodity products. The job is to pick from them the ones that will make money. The best way to do this, from an institutional limitation perspective, is to claim all inventions, and then pick through them. Limitation practice means establishing standard procedures to pick through things. Transparency means creating committees of faculty, administrators, and business folks to observe the picking process. The administrative term for this picking over is “commercial potential.” But the actual deal is “money any way you can.” Except, of course “any way you can” reduces to “any way the institution permits” and that gets us back to the limitations imposed by institutions rather than the focus required of, say, an entrepreneur.
Other variations on the theme are “we are a full service office” and “we can do anything.” Offices making such claims are generally not full service and cannot do much even within their chosen model. Failing to acknowledge limitation is one of the more egregious of their limitations.
Let’s look at how this works. First, the linear model, our old useless friend. It goes: invention to patent to marketing to license to money. The trigger event is a report of invention in research, the value added is to slap a patent monopoly sticker on it, and the outcome is money. Oh, and the politics of it is, university money = public benefit. Times money received from licensing by the reciprocal of a typical patent license royalty rate (say, x50 for a 2% rate), and divide by an average salary without benefits and overhead and you’ve got “job creation” without ever counting jobs or considering jobs lost, or jobs switched, or profits taken.
The big horseradish in the sauce of the linear model is the magicality of going from marketing to license. The grail according to the Carolina Express folks is offering up a non-descript biotech license done once to everyone, with the threat if you don’t take it you will actually have to deal personally with licensing staff, their apparently stubborn and unpredictable attorneys, and a distracted review chain that’s unable to prioritize. The upshot of such an “express” deal is: “don’t ask us to focus, just take the limitation we have set up in the name of efficiency.”
The institutional linear model of licensing limits technology transfer to patents licensed to monopolists for sale of products. No royalties, no reason to license. No monopoly, no reason to invest. To the licensor of monopolists, a non-exclusive license is “just a tax.” That’s as far as the intellectual depth goes. Not standards, say, or cross-licensing, or public license, or open innovation. Commercialization does not mean, say, company internal use, but rather sale of product.
Still, commercialization is worthy. No question about it. Commercialization is way cool. It is wonderful. Even seductive. Taking the piggy to market (though the piggy might not get what the trip is all about). Technology transfer folks cannot help themselves. They want commercialization. It is the object of their policies and practices. And that’s one of the primary reasons (not the only one) why their practices are limited rather than focused.
There is more to technology transfer than commercialization. There is more to getting to commercialization than trying to hit it big. There is more to hitting it big than always trying to do that each time. IP policies that are set up to make it easier for bureaucrats to hit it big, or even “just in case” someone hits it big work generally against commercialization. They limit the collaborations by which research engages community. They limit the methods by which patents may promote use. They limit the opportunities for commercial use and development. They limit the ways in which university contributions may be recognized.
Making invention disclosure compulsory, or making invention title automagically vest with a university administration, or claiming to do everything when one lacks the expertise to do even the most basic things–these are not things that focus effort, but rather limit it.