Artifact, Invention, Technology, Change

University research technology often takes the form of artifacts.  Often the academic discussion is about the merit of research objectives in terms of demonstrating, proving out, or advancing a concept or theory or argument.  The “technology” that results is treated in discourse as an illustration or artifact of that effort rather than as something intended for general use.  It is hard even to call it technology.  It is more like stem cells–it could differentiate into a technology if induced in the right ways.

This idea of inducement or engagement is a lot broader than the notion of  “transferring” technology.  The research artifacts aren’t really technology, though they may be technical.  The patents on them aren’t really patents on technology though there are inventions there.  One can’t reason from the words “technology transfer” and think that the job is done by shoveling something from A to B, or by constructing a license that permits B to shovel from A.

Research assets generally require inducement or engagement to become technology.  It is a social thing.  Sending money, guns, lawyers is one way to do it.  But social adoption of technology is a lot bigger than that.   If one thinks of technology transfer functions in this way, one would not use “technology transfer”or “industry alliances” or “commercialization center”.   One would use “technology formation catalyst”, or “inducerizer”, or “provocateurship”, or some sort.   One certainly wouldn’t use “innovation” since that is an attribute of the desired effect of one’s work and it is terribly difficult to reason from an effect back to the actions that might give rise to the effect.

Consider, in this way, justice or timekeeping.  One gets no clue what to do by reasoning from these words.  They are more like aspirational statements than guidance.  May as well name the technology transfer office the “Office of Inventor Joy and Benefits to the Public”, or if one wanted a title that could withstand audit and place success squarely in the hands of those involved, the “Office of Many Uncertaintites and Disappointments”.  But either way, it’s just aspirational stuff.

This discourse of research artifacts differs from commercial usage, where research work is typically depicted as leading to potential new products that will create future shareholder value, even when the underlying purpose may be to do more of the academic thing and illustrate an idea.  When commercial labs do things for the ideas, they are called skunk works and the like–relieved of having to make everything they do sound like a future product.  Similarly, when universities try to shift to a commercialization discourse, they may make claims for research artifacts as having great product potential, just as a company might, when in actual fact, there is no merit in the claim for potential one way or another.  It’s just a way of talking about research work that gains prestige in a particular circle, so it’s done.

One place that university research technology gets grounded is in the development of research tools.  Tools get used in research.  Research tools, in many ways, was one of the earliest places where “innovation” had a positive meaning in discourse.  Research tools get used in the field, become adopted, become part of the research effort.  Tools have to work well enough for university researchers to get something done, not just illustrate a point.

So one place to look carefully, and to push, if one is looking for university research “technology”, is for the tool sets that go with whatever is being studied, developed, or demonstrated.  The tools may not all be original with the lab using them–most likely not–but it is the tools + the artifacts + expertise that gives you a technology that can work.  That is, one looks for projects that have tools + artifacts + expertise persisting long enough to engage them.   The last thing you would want to do is extract tools or artifacts or expertise from the project just because you found and claimed a patent right.   It may need to be done, but not as the first thing, or a usual thing, or a processiferously unthinking thing to do.

Those looking to university research for new technology do not need technology “products” in any commercial sense–what they need are technology in configurable, usable research forms giving them the tools to create technology from research concepts, artifacts, and provisional findings.

It is these tool forms that can most readily be applied quickly, adapted readily, and extended in parallel with continuing research.  To have a research platform with tools + artifacts + expertise running parallel with the best work in the world–that is pretty much as good as it gets.  Then anyone with the tool technology is seeing at the edge of what folks can see with the tool, not straggling along three or six years late when a research technology has become a generally adopted standard, product, or method.

This is why it is so very important that university IP management for research work *not* copy business norms. 

First, it should *not* adopt the commercialization vocabulary. That shifts discourse from universities as the ultimate good gracious way cool skunk works of all time to just another claim on shareholder value rarely realized, making everyone suspect it’s all just hype to cover for mismanagement, ineptitude, privilege, and failure.  Problems in discourse lead to problems in practice.   Care in one’s vocabulary and register lead to care in one’s practices.  This matters, not because practices exist in abstract categories, but because practices are social acts that have social consequences.  And whatever innovation is, it is social.

Second, IP management should *not* attempt the linear model as a standard process for research IP. University research assets do not generally go from concept to product.  That’s business vocabulary.  That implies control.   Things *do go* from concept to product.  But not  so much *university things*.  The linear model operates once a decade per 2000 inventions.  It is a rare and special and important event.  The linear model is an exceptional thing, not the immediate goal of every bit of patent work.

One does not hasten that event by claiming IP and running it through a process populated by mostly good hearted bureaucrats.  No matter how talented and sincere, waterboys don’t win football games.

What US universities have set up by way of IP management is at best a massive superstition, perhaps a collective, slow moving administrative hysteria, around creating processes for patents, royalties, and innovation to make a lot of money licensing patents on research inventions.   It has become so widespread it no longer looks like a belief system.  It’s just the way the world is.   The locust sees only a green earth ahead until it dies.   There’s no annual report from an OTL that looks back at the barren, stripped earth of research projects from which inventions have been claimed and squandered.

IP management at universities should be focused instead on keeping noise out of the pathways for these rare events by routing research artifacts somewhat away from the linear model.  Leave the model well enough alone, come to understand the pre-conditions under which a linear model event might form, and be prepared to act, say, a few times a decade.   Sooner than an earthquake or tornado, not as often as a hot date or a big sale at your car dealership.

One of the greatest errors in the development of university IP management has been to conceive of the linear model event as a process that administrators can work as a system.  Folks do this because they tell stories of those events while dropping lots of the practice details, and then trying to reason from the stories to orderly processes to make more stories just like those.   That’s aspirational, even sincere, even spirited toward public benefit.  But sincerity is just another form of bullshit if it has no regard for the truth, and if the only truth folks know is sloppy, aspirational story telling about successes, then no wonder we have such practices spruced up to look intelligent.   But if you have been involved in practice, and examined practice–the unexamined technology practice life is not worth doing–then the success stories look facile, superficial, dropping the important details–because perhaps folks would get sued, or see that it was luck rather than skill, perhaps, or that the mundane isn’t so full of dramatic tension as the heroic bits.

The result is something that looks orderly, even attractive.   Research!  Invention!  Patent!  Marketing!  License!  Money!  Benefit!  What could be more clear than that?  Make sure every story repeats these themes.   Instead this sort of story–even where it can be told– is a counter to the broad practice of IP management for research artifacts, a 99% blockage, a useless attractant of wrongly raised expectations, crazily unmeetable claims, and procedures disconnected for the most part from how linear model rare events come about.  More disclosures of  research invention do not get one more linear model events.  More licenses to moribund technologies in nearly dead companies do not increase your rate or even your chances.  More and more patents accumulated do not get you a pleasure dome.  All that work load in fact may decrease your chances, distract your attention, dilute your talent, and leave you unready and unable to act when the opportunity for the decade event shows up.

A tidal wave approaches and you are busy creating a new rebranding effort for your technology transfer office er industry alliances office er commercialization center.    Like, yeah, right.   There is no point in *improving on your rebranding efforts* (or anything else like that).

Third, university IP management  should *not* attempt to use IP in research tools in the same way that folks use IP in commercialization settings. Not linear model, not the things that keep the linear model clear to operate.   Not to commercialize.  Not to find monopolists willing to build product.  This is another abuse of university IP policy, that it treats all inventions without regard for their research context or the roles they may play in inducing new technology platforms and directions.  Under the typical university IP policy, an invention is an invention, a patent is a patent, and now the policy will proceed to processify the linear model and make lots of money through commercialization.  Except you won’t, and can’t.

Research inventions are not a state function.  They are almost always pathway dependent, from how they have arisen to where they or anyone is headed next.  And those pathways, social relationships with variously intermixed signals, exchanges,  trusts, and cautions may matter more than any patents.   Indeed, thinking to use a patent to create a new pathway, and always to a royalty-bearing license, is nuts, especially if it destroys all that matters in those social relationships.

Why can’t technology transfer officers who really dislike this kind of discourse understand the situation?   They get all defensive.  And yet this isn’t criticism of  technology transfer.   One wonders after their world view, their competence, their self-esteem.   There is no way that every research development that can be called an invention and a patent got on it should be part of an effort to commercialize.  It makes no sense.  It is about as dull an idea as one can get.  It leads to ridiculous expectations, hopelessly failed discourse, deep suspicions and distrust and bitterness, and destroys much of the fun and vitality and impact of doing research.

It is worthy to attempt difficult things.  It is foolish to make difficult things look like a administrative processes and then make it appear one is doing something when one isn’t.   It is even more foolish to make things go down a difficult path rather than other, much more accessible paths, just because someone wants the money for the university.  What attracts people to do this?

Almost all of the researchers I have worked with respect the idea that building relationships around research technology for commercial investment is difficult.   They accept that the success rate is low, just as it is for getting grants or getting published in the top journals.  Still one tries to get grants and publish in top journals.  But they don’t like being lied to or misled.  They don’t like it when people cannot judge their own competence relative to a task and sell themselves as much better than they are, and then try to cover up when things don’t work out.   They don’t respect that in other investigators, and they won’t have it in anyone who works with them on IP or industry relationships.

There are great people in this line of work, but there are also way too many glad-handing, b-s-ing self-promoters feeding research and administrative folks a line and who simply do not have the ability to follow through on what they say.  They don’t even rightly know what they are saying, and don’t care.  Commercialization!  Process!  Orderly control!  but Oh!  The Funding Gap!  Change the culture!   Industry’s fault!   Government’s fault!    Rebranding!   Reorganization!   The upshot is:  it would all be successful if the world was built around what they mouth off.   They are not what national innovation policy needs.

And yet university administrations persist in hiring these folks.  And faculty suffer them.  Why is that?   Why is there such a bozonet in technology transfer, of all places, where we want to match our best research expertise with the challenges and opportunities of our communities to shape our very futures, in health, security, technology, and fun.   Why does the bozonet have to land *here*, in technology transfer of all places?  Damn.

If you are trying to get at  research “technology” at a university, you will find artifacts and research folks will qualify those artifacts as illustrations, as works in progress, as part of some not-yet-completed whole.  Fill in around the artifacts with the tools being used, the tools being developed, and the expertise, and you get an idea of what you can get access to, and how that might become something useful, like a technology or at least a library of stuff or a testbed or a platform, a scaffolding from which a technology might be assembled.

The research stuff that gets transferred readily are research tools.  The lab will be using them, and others will want access to them, and there will be ideas about how to extend them, and adapt them.  The pathways for doing this are not generally those of technology commercialization, patent licensing for monopoly investment, of getting on the highway of the linear model as if one invention becomes one product, all devoid of context, of pathway.  The technology that gets “commercialized” often arises from these tools, is induced from them, comes about by common recognition of what is possible, and may not take, even, the form of product sold, but rather may be standards, or methods, or self-implemented.

For university technology transfer to do its job, it has to trigger on something other than something being an invention to feed future monopolists willing to share the proceeds.   There aren’t that many sharing types among monopolists, and generally they have gotten where they are, if they are anything at all, by not sharing.  An exclusive patent license is sort of a confirming promise not to share.  That’s what the clauses preventing sublicensing and giving stuff away at no charge are all about.  So of course the linear model proposition is, shall we say,  difficult.

Every so often, a university gets a shot at being part of those arrangements for derivative, differentiating, commercializing technologies.  Generally, that’s because the others involved want the university to get a share.  Technology transfer and IP management might productively aim to increase this desire for those involved in inducing a technology to differentiate from research work to cut in or give back to the university.

It may sound easier to say–why do you want to build goodwill when you can threaten them all with a patent?    They have to pay.  You can make them pay.  Why would you waste time and effort trying to be fluffy with them?  They are after all in this view non-sharing successful monopolists.   When that’s one’s world view, no wonder the current, narrow implementations of university technology transfer and IP management are such a drag on research, on collaboration, and ultimately on national innovation.   Time for change.  This could be really, really fun.