You know, the money sweet spot for invention commercialization is to take acute conditions and make them chronic. That’s like a drug to treat the pain rather than an intervention that cures the condition causing the pain, or providing protection or prevention so that the condition doesn’t happen. In any event, you want something that takes at least 20 years to saturate the market. Recurring is better than one time.
Cures aren’t as good as vaccines. Prevention isn’t as good as cures. Vaccines are best if they are required every year, like a flu shot, and better yet if they just mitigate the symptoms so there’s still some OTC action.
Cynical? No. Really. If one is going to refer research inventions to markets that are lucrative, then chronic conditions are the place to play. That’s where an invention has its maximum money potential. Find things that are intractable, and mitigate them with recurring doses of innovation. Health conditions, poverty, crime, entertainment, security, education, food–make it continuing and the revenue streams are tremendous. In a way, chronic conditions are the stuff of markets, because we all have to eat, our clothes wear out, and we get bored much too easily.
There’s a kind of innovation that feeds chronic markets. In health care, that would be the drug that manages things like high blood pressure or recurrent headaches. That’s where it is easiest to see market potential, imagine products, and attract monopoly protected investment that sees potential in an exclusive patent license. If one is going for the money, one cannot do better than chronic stuff.
From the point of view of chronic market potential, anything that looks like a cure is a threat. It’s like what peace means to the navy captains in a Patrick O’Brian novel–the end of all the good things like war that bring with them the potential for advancement and adventure that come with chronic war.
Cures in their various forms present as an attack on a large portion of the status quo. In medicine, a vaccine beats up on a maintenance drug. Prevention is a catastrophe. In transportation, an electric car ends whole industries in dealing with oil changes and tune ups, not to mention sending taxing authorities back to innovating to find a new way to tax. In energy, a cure might look like a personal fusion reactor, kicking out the E = mc^2 stuff so that you just don’t need coal or dams or solar panels any more. Durn innovation cures. Luckily, every cure has its own unanticipated spawn of chronic new things, so there’s always hope.
Beyond chronic stuff and cures, there also are things that entrench the status quo. These sorts of innovation make better, faster, or more efficient whatever already is. Call it value engineering, but more than that, it is called riding the gravy train. Ice box technology fought a long battle to stay economically viable against the disaster called the electric refrigerator. The buggy whip industry worked right up to the end to improve. If only they had had a better grasp on the potential for road rage a hundred years ago. Wherever there’s an established infrastructure, established value chains and market channels, there’s a big dose of the status quo looking for improvements that keep it right where it is, on top of things, jostling with other like things.
When university investigators do research, and there’s some invention, then it’s not good enough to look for just any commercial potential. The money position is in chronic conditions. Anything recurring, anything with limited but statistically significant impact, anything that takes multiple doses or uses, especially anything addicting or at least creating an tacit, life-long dependency.
If the money position isn’t there, the attack from the bottom. That’s the disruptive innovation that displaces the status quo with a remarkably similar status quo. Do a lot of the same thing, but do it sufficiently differently that the status quo can’t adapt in time when they realize that you are taking over. Sort of like hermit crabs on a maraud, not waiting for the current occupant to leave the shell.
If you can’t get at things from the bottom, then look to improve the status quo. That is, offer innovation that makes the status quo stronger. That doesn’t innovate much, but it’s a money position, and there’s a market, if you can make the case–especially if the status quo thinks you might have alternatives if they don’t pay up.
Finally, we have the cures. These are the real problem solvers. But they aren’t money positions in the long term, not unless the problem takes 20 years to solve–you know, what’s the point of a 20-year patent if all the action is over in year 2. Worse if folks don’t need your patent and can do the cure themselves. Luckily, patent can exclude personal use, too–so you can make them pay to cure themselves, if you can catch them at it. No point in commercializing stuff with the patent system if you can’t sell something, even if it is protection. That’s a nice looking cure you have there–pity if something were to happen to it. Or, better, no point in curing things quickly with the patent system, if you can make money another way, a slower way. What is the motivation to ruin a good thing like illness when you can get a share of the action? In the money world, a slow cure is way, way better than a fast cure.
That leaves us with the sort of basic research that isn’t about grand challenges or solutions to the status quo’s needs–the problems created and especially continually refreshed by the status quo. For this remaining stuff, invention is pretty interesting. There is no market. Results have no commercial potential. Discoveries aren’t expected to solve anything in a lucrative, almost but not quite forever way. It is skew. It is unexpected. If it it has commercial potential, it is because it becomes its own market. Quantum effects. Dark energy. Use the force, Luke. How does one use the patent system to promote this kind of thing?
The transformational stuff doesn’t have a market, unless the subtext is simply to horn in somehow on existing markets–chronic, disruptive, value, or cure. If by “marketing” technology one means referring discoveries to *existing* markets, then one is emphasizing one or more of these forms of innovation, to help things persist or take them over or entrench them or perhaps threaten to end them (where the resistance from markets may be the strongest, and the opportunity buy things out or string things out is a decent option). If university technology transfer offices are working this angle, then they have done a great deal to make connections between the value of research and things that *entrench* the status quo, with various enhancements, rather than transform it.
The biggest transformation we have seen with university research technology is the internet. And for it, the patents have come later. They are an index of the status quo catching up with the transformation. The biotech revolution had the misfortune of too many patents too soon, and while a few people have gotten rich, as an industry it hasn’t turned a net profit most of the years of its existence, and where it has, it’s mostly been chronic drug development, with a few vaccines. We have yet to see the lame walk and the blind see. Regenerative medicine might do that yet. But it will take longer if the patents lead the transformation and create too many connections to the interests of the status quo and its markets.
What about this? Is it possible for a really different kind of technology transfer office, where one transfers a technology *into the unknown*. Not to existing markets, not to the big companies, not to the venture investors who are parasitic on the big companies, lacking an IPO market, not to governments who know what is best so long as it is socially invariant relative to governments and conforms to the recommendations of the experts in the field who mostly work for big companies or venture investors.
Yes, that’s what I want to work for–a technology transfer office that transfers discovery into the unknown–the social unknown, the imaginative unknown, the technological unknown, the industrial unknown. That’s the place for transformations that change the course of world events. That where we feel our juices as human beings working to figure the mysteries of this blue planet. That’s where the inquiry of basic research has its biggest payoffs. That’s the form of technology transfer innovation I would like to be part of.