The story of invention to money happens, generally, afterward. It is a way that stories like this are told. Once there is a product, one can pick any starting point and tell of challenges and effort and luck, so long as one ends up with the product getting sold–“a success”. A typical starting point for such stories, by convention, is an invention.
But it need not be. The starting point could be a problem, or a life changing event, or a lucky meeting. Some products are sold without inventions (like a good meal in a restaurant, or a cell line). Others become valuable later because someone recognizes their importance. Invention to money is *at least* a good story pattern. The question is: is it more than that? Is it worth *trying to make the story true?*
Should life imitate art that claims to imitate life? Should IP policy aim to enforce such imitation? By trying our very, very hardest to make this story, and just this story (we are focused!), come true, are we in fact even doing what it takes to make such stories come true? That is, is the selection of details that makes a satisfying story of innovation the selection of details needed to build decent support for the engagement of research and community? Or even to build decent support for commercialization of new products and practices?
Does trying to *win* help one *win football games*. Or does lifting weights or practicing footwork or studying game film or following one’s instincts or getting lucky? What if winning is a matter of improving one’s luck, as Fran Slowiczek and Pamela M. Peters discuss in “Discovery, Chance and the Scientific Method“?
We see this process: activity takes place leading to a successful product on the market. Someone chooses a set of events and agents and constructs a story about how a given thing has happened, leaving out lots of other details that don’t fit the story. Someone else gathers such stories where they involve an invention and a successful product and asks, what can we learn from these stories? Folks then work hard to make events follow the same path, write policies to make their work easier, and create “training” for researchers so that they, too, can be one day featured in such a story about how the process “worked”.
The stories themselves are legitimate constructs. Stories make a moral claim, rooted in right choice and wrong choice or lacking choice. One certainly can learn from stories. But what we learn is not in general forced upon us. We also have choice. Meaning, of course, that we also are moral beings and innovation stories are not dogma nor truth that excludes all other truths.
Here’s the thing. If we tell only one kind of innovation story, and then try to build “innovation systems” that try to implement (with efficiency!) the steps of that kind of story, it is not at all evident that one gets what one aspires to. Indeed, it is evident one generally doesn’t. We can only learn so much of the world from stories, and it’s even less when the stories are all of a kind.
If you want a 5% return on your investments, you don’t invest in securities that historically return 5%. You invest in a range of securities so that the likely outcome of some very risky things and some not so risky things ends up around 5%.
If you want to end up with the stuff by which to tell innovation stories, then you need to work to create the environment with all those details that will get left out in the stories but which turn out to be essential to the success of the effort. The world is unbearably rich. Narrative provides frameworks. Narrative can also destroy richness and opportunity. We call that dull narrative.
Story and practice are not one. As Todorov would have it, there is no primitive narrative. There is no one set of “just the facts” that by study are revealed as the only possible “true” narrative available. An innovation story is a claim. It is also necessarily a selection of details to establish that claim. To turn the story into a process misses the point entirely. The story is about the past. If one aims to make it about the *future*, there’s a lot more to do. To think that if details are not important to the story, they are not important to a process inspired by the story also misses the point entirely. Efficiency is not a matter of excluding from practice the details that success stories don’t tell. Building an innovation environment is not a matter of slavishly following the narratives of one sort of story.
You might see then a reason why I don’t care much for the “commercialization” stories told by university technology transfer offices. It is not that such stories–whether in a diagram of the “technology transfer process” or an annual report or a press release–are not “true,” but rather that they also make an implicit claim for what details are important to future practice. And that selection of details is narrow, consistent, and dull.
People come to think that the selection of details represents the best reality of practice. Other people come to think that it isn’t good practice if it doesn’t follow that selection–or even that things could be improved by reasoning *from the story*. And still other people think it is a threat to the whole enterprise to suggest the story isn’t right or there are other stories just as important. And then people into efficiency and orderliness think that IP policies and laws and contracts that make everything happen just this way are a really good thing. How can all those people be so off?
Story telling is selective. Research and a lot of other things leads to an invention and a lot of other things and to patents and a lot of other things to working with folks at this company or that foundation and a lot of other things to an idea for applying the invention with a lot of other things to forming a contract relationship involving a license to a patent and a lot of other things to getting something into use and a lot of other things that leads to a product definition and a lot of other things that leads to sales and a lot of other things which leads to payments under the contract and a lot of other things. Invention to patent to product to money. Patent to money. Money=public benefit. The “lot of other things” may matter more than the story lets on. How could anyone know? But clearly invention and patent and license and product and money matter. So folks go, let’s build with these as the focus. Doing so looks orderly, reasonable, diligent, and politically savvy. A simple story, call it commercialization, repeated until it displaces doubt and stubbornness and alternatives and opportunities.
But this story structure, even throwing out all those other details, is still built with the idea that things start with research, rather than with, say, a look at what motivates the need for research, or whether the research was directed or accidental, or whether it was even essential to the flow of practice that gets to a new product. What if research comes in the middle or is an afterthought? What if the invention is a distraction? What if demand for a contract takes energy out of the effort? What if the outcome was a standard rather than a platform? Research may lead to invention and discovery, but invention and discovery do not depend solely on research, certainly not solely on academic research. And it is not the case that the only use–or even the primary use, or the best use–of the patent system by universities is to replicate innovation stories that start with university researcher and end up with money for the university.
We don’t, however, have good forums in which to work through these matters and tell stories with other details, selected for other reasons. That’s what is needed, so we have narratives that tend to open up the possibilities for innovation rather than ones that, generally, foreclose them.