The most robust area of university technology transfer innovation is the formation of excuses for why the class of success stories is robust but apparently so little is happening. Here are five typical excuses. May as well learn them by heart.
1. Faculty are not properly trained and aren’t cooperating. Their research “culture” has to change. Faculty are uncooperative, greedy, ignorant, gullible. They lack the insight to think business thoughts like real business people think. The public is being *damaged* by their lack of cooperation. If we could get the faculty truly excited about driving expensive cars, or adapting their research to look like more like corporate research, or just even thinking about patents, then it would all work and there would be more success stories. It’s not the approach we are taking, it’s those filthy, unwashed faculty who don’t get it. If faculty were docile, compliant employees working for the greater good, then our work would be successful.
2. We lack administrative resources. The university does not provide enough resources to do a good job with all the inventions we see every year. If the office had more money, then there would be better outcomes. More money for patenting, more seed money for startups, more money to hire and retain professional staff, more money for offices that look plush, since plush offices translates into successful deals. It may very well be that technology transfer offices lack resources. It may be that lacking resources means that one is not working in the channels where resources would be available. That, at least, would be a basic set of questions to ask. Is the employer a slumlord with regard to research innovation? If so, does it make any sense to ask the slumlord to change?
3. There is a funding gap, a valley of death. If there were just a lot more money for follow-on research, or for making products, or getting things closer to reality than claims about “potential” can do on their own, why then the class would be robust. This excuse plays on the very real need for funding and translates it to a huge class of things that may not benefit at all from more funding. For every glimmer of a research idea, one can paste a dollar value on it to imagine a successful product, and if that money is not available, then it’s the funding gap and not, say, the impossible leap from glimmer to any particular product. There are funding gaps. But in university technology transfer, it’s an indiscriminate excuse.
4. Industry lacks innovation capacity. Folks in industry just don’t get it. They are stuck in their ruts and just won’t innovate. All these great university inventions, and industry sticks to its own products and doesn’t change. Somehow industry has to be forced to innovate, and to take paying licenses from university administrators when they do. That’s the problem. Uh-huh. Again, there are times this is true, and for a lot of interesting reasons. But with university technology transfer, is mostly a convenient excuse.
5. Industry won’t cooperate. When industry does innovate, they are mean-spirited and don’t take licenses to university patent rights and choose other things, or worse, they innovate right on top of those rights without paying! Here we have this perfectly good *system* of invention to product, and industry for the most part rejects it. We have to defend our patent rights or they won’t be worth anything. We battle industry over sponsored research terms, over economic development, over licensing to start ups, and over big-time royalty-bearing licenses. We battle over publication and risk and governing law. Even UIDP and Lambert can’t figure out how to get industry to cooperate because they keep trying to get *us* to change. If it wasn’t for the mean-spiritedness of industry, there would be way more success stories.
I have no doubt. It couldn’t possibly be the mismatch of the little linear model to the world, could it?