Let’s unwind university technology transfer practice, from the little linear model out.
1. Commercialization as a product paying a royalty under an exclusive patent license. How much of research invention output gets there? After 30 years, it appears fewer than 10%, maybe fewer than 1% of reported inventions. Kauffman Foundation calls this “sub-optimal” and AUTM responds, no it’s not. I agree with AUTM. It’s optimal. Won’t get any better than this. Same licensing rates as the federal government had all those years ago. The only improvement left is in building better excuses.
2. Technology transfer as a push of patents to industry. This limitation treats university research as the start of a process, and that it is the university’s job to get a share of any downstream benefits by taking an early patent position. It is not considered that innovation might go the other direction, moving from some non-university insight into the university for scientific work or validation, while moving in another direction for development. Then the university’s inventions would be an ancillary bit, not the start of something new.
3. The need for license contracts. The little linear model, as implemented by universities, requires a claim of ownership in inventions, which in turn requires an act of licensing, and that in turn requires contracts. Contracts are remarkably challenging things for universities, carrying lots of overhead and worry beyond the basic idea of agreeing not to sue someone for practicing what a research team has uncovered. The limitation of the little linear model is that it requires the use of contracts. In one university, a license is construed as a contract document, running to scores of pages, while a non-assert may be a single sentence buried in an industry sponsored research agreement (or federal contract, even). Even though a license is a promise not to assert, a license contract has to carry all that overhead to be allowed through the process. That’s quite a limitation.
4. The need for a license. Back it off even further. An invention is just another research artifact, like data, discovery, software, technical reports, tangible materials, insights. Putting a claim of ownership on it is transformative. First that claim of ownership by the university requires individuals to determine their personal interest in ownership. Anywhere there is ownership without a clear intention, there is uncertainty and risk for everyone else—not just industry but also all other universities and other research organizations.
Second, once one has ownership, then that ownership has to be managed as to licenses. Without licenses, no legal practice of the invention. If a university is unable to grant a license—whether a tightly negotiated one with those pesky but desirable monopolists or a “just a tax” license, going for the money without the more excellent public good of stuffing the pie hole of a monopolist first—then everyone lives in uncertainty of what the university may intend to do. No licenses granted = exclusion of practice.
5. Woah, you mean technology transfer might take place without licenses? Yup. But let’s keep some focus. We are talking patent licenses, where the university has claimed patent rights to research-originated inventions, and those licenses run from the university to others. We still could be dealing with other forms of license—copyright, say. An open source license is a copyright license with recipient limitations on setting redistribution conditions. And these licenses might not run from the university to others, but from individuals to others, or from others to others. Even without an ownership claim, a receiving organization might want paperwork clarity with regard to provenance or known hazards from the providing organization. Not a license, more like a manifest or shipping invoice.
A technology is a way of doing some useful thing in the material world. It is not merely a trendy sounding synonym for invention or for patent. An invention may suggest a new technology, or it may be an extension of an existing technology. More so, what is an invention but a conception of something new and unanticipated recognized and made evident? The thing that makes an invention part of a technology is the web of expertise, practice, products, determination, and tools that allows the invention to be used.
A nail may be an invention, but it is the hammer, and the ability to use the hammer, and with a knowledge of the right materials, that is necessary to turn that nail invention into a “fastening technology”. It is a limitation to think of research inventions as technologies, or that the act of licensing a patent in such an invention is technology transfer. Licensing patents is a form of arbitrage. It moves around control of a right. If licensing patents is part of technology transfer, it is generally subordinate to the emergence of a broader capability than that of infringing the licensed patent. That is, from no-technology to technology, or from technology to improved technology, or from that technology to a different technology. It is a limitation to assert that the patent license is the first thing or the most important thing or the only thing that enables these relationships.
True, there are times when it is true, the patent license does a lot of work. The deep down thick thing, though, is to assume that by trying harder with even more research inventions, got by compulsion, one can make this true in general.