In a discussion over at the LinkedIn group SpinOut, there is a valuable discussion going on the matter of the University of Glasgow’s splash in the press about offering a free license (exclusive, apparently, even) to patented technology, if only a company will show up with a plan for its development. The SpinOut group has consistently been one of the most productive and thoughtful forums for the development of these ideas, with a particular emphasis on the UK, where many of its participants are based. That in itself provides a valuable counterpoint to US sensibilities regarding the role of research inventions in a broader economy.
I’m reposting some of my comments there with an editorial pass here, combined into a single statement that aims to get at the limits of a linear model approach, but at the same time acknowledging that it, too, has its place. It is worth making a study of how and when a linear model approach does operate. Universities have not for the most part done that. I hold out the possibility that a lot of really dedicated, capable folks have been tasked to build out on a foundation that deserves no such attention. Can folks be wrong? Yes, sadly. It isn’t socially seemly, and there is common cause to dispute it, but one has to question the fundamental idea that expanding a working approach by making it comprehensive, compulsory, administrative, and seated in universities would make that approach better, or that the approach could even continue to be the same approach. It isn’t on either count.
The “model” that is co-opted and distorted doesn’t work any better. It works worse than before, and it causes damage where it didn’t before, and it distracts folks from doing other things, and it makes it more difficult or impossible to do things that folks would have productively done before, or would do now, but they cannot. And all of this–no, it isn’t documented. If you live in the creepy world in which the only things that are true are the ones you read in the academic or government statistical world, and those things are true somehow until they are disproved, then heaven help you.
When the Romans left the city of Bath, they departed villas with wonderful tile floors that would glisten in the glow of fires in the fireplaces. But when the Anglo-Saxons later moved into these fine buildings, they punched holes in the roof and lit their fires on the tile floors, because they couldn’t figure out how to use the fireplaces. So much for getting it. I’m sure there were Anglo-Saxons expert at punching the holes and others who understood best where to situate a fire on the tile floor to get maximum effect, taking into account the ventilation in the room, the size of the hole in the roof, and the prevailing weather conditions. But all that expertise doesn’t get one back to the use of the fireplace.
It may not be possible to reach to practice imaginatively if you haven’t spent any time there. And you might therefore make the simplifying assumption that you don’t really have to know the details because those details are just species of readily available abstractions like commercialization and invention. But it is in the species, the individual, that innovation has its roots. It is not in the abstractions that already are so general as to be the bland tools of economists. One does not reason from the general to the individual and get anywhere. One does not find all the multitude of things to be discovered by sitting behind a desk. Some things are there, yes. Somethings fall into our heads without a knowledge of the world. But many things do not, any more than Werner could recover the history of the earth from the mines of Saxony, while Hutton traveled the world, observing. Both end up sitting at a desk, but it is not the desk bit that makes the difference. Similarly, merely being embedded in practice does not of itself improve one’s outlook any more than writing by hand improves one’s handwriting. You have to work at understanding what one experiences, does. That’s more than fitting each thing on sees into ready-made categories like “license” and “royalties” and “problem inventor”.
If it’s true that UK companies simply are not interested in anything new, that is something. Otherwise, one might ask whether UK companies are drawing from other sources for new stuff–from companies in other countries, like Germany or China, or from universities in other countries. That might show UK companies working in a different part of value chains–riding out all the uncertainties of research patents and early risk development to select higher quality, perhaps safer, products for their acquisition and investment.
As for offering patent rights for free, folks need to see this gesture in context. A university (meaning, its faculty and students) makes research ideas and data and tools available to others. These assets participate in scholarly exchange and publication, in research advancing the state of the art, for which there is quite a competition for priority, credit, and status. Now the university comes along and says 1) we own inventions 2) we will manage those administratively rather than academically unlike everything else 3) we will file patents on these inventions (which raises the overhead of transacting exchanges of inventions) and 4) we will hold these patents exclusively for the commercial market, as inducements to invest in products or companies, without offering general rights to all non-commercial or even internal do-it-yourself for-profit users.
When this doesn’t work–for whatever reason–and there is plenty of evidence that this model works in the best circumstances (in the US, at least) once a decade per “world class” research university–the patents sit, unlicensed, in an accumulation portfolio that looks no different from that of a patent trolling organization. Now we hear that a university, to try to squeeze anything at all out of such an infrequent model, is willing to give the rights at no charge for an exclusive license, as if the problem is price. I cannot believe that price is the problem here. If the problem is that UK companies lack the ability to jump on each and every research inventive thing as a new product–good for them. Who would have such an ability or even wish? Why would anyone think that the output of even a world class research university would be such a load of shovel ready investable IP assets? What do folks think university research is?
No, the problem is in the positioning of research assets, forcing them to a non-existent commercial marketplace as product, and getting frustrated and desperate when the offer is not often taken, but still keeping that same model, the same spin, the same hope going. University research assets have many other potential places in which to have impact that don’t involve immediate productisation. Perhaps we will see some universities exploring other models with other impacts, besides trying direct to impel commercialization. Maybe those other models are a better source, even, in the end, of commercial opportunities by changing the timing of interest in commercial opportunities. But then, those opportunities would appear as externalities to a research asset practice, not the immediate, outright goals.
One hundred years of experience with the use of patents by academics to promote industry investment (in the US) shows outcomes of maybe once a decade per school if one looks to commercialization in the form of products, with the proxy of royalty bearing licenses generate revenues sufficient to fund such an operation. Much effort has been made to take an approach that was highly selective, done at the initiative of faculty inventors, moved to external but sympathetic organizations such as Research Corporation and local research foundations, and turn it into a process controlled by universities, expansive in its claims on inventions, increasingly compulsory in its demands, with effort devoted increasingly to making work a “linear model” of commercialization.
The historical approach does “work”. It works wonderfully. It works when faculty select it, because they see a good match between what they have and the resources available and an opportunity to have an impact. It doesn’t work any better–in fact, much worse–when the approach is clogged with everything possible, like the Three Stooges all trying to get through the same door, with the claim that it would work if tech transfer officers were better staffed, the research produced something it never has, wealthy investors weren’t so prudent, or companies were indiscriminate in their interests and grabbed everything universities were prepared to throw over their fences. Now made more attractive because the stuff they are willing to throw in your yard is *absolutely free*.
University research has huge value. I believe that and am committed to it. And it’s of course true that some matters are better studied with research than others, and some folks are smarter or more diligent or more willing to reach out and engage a public. And doing things smarter, more carefully, and with a willingness to devote public time are good things. But to say that the primary, only, or most important outcome of research is an immediate stream of things to commercialize–no, that’s missing a bunch of things.
The university as a daily engine for economic growth is well documented. You can see it in educated folks taking decisions, in graduates moving into positions of responsibility, in the phone calls that faculty take from folks in industry, and those they call. But the particular economic value of university compulsory claimed inventions subject to a commercialization license has not been well documented, but for a deal once every decade or so, somewhat more frequently if you are Stanford or MIT, somewhat less frequently if you aren’t. The AUTM licensing survey, for all the worthy efforts of those who have developed it, effectively and knowingly obscures the structure of licensing transactions to provide an illusory (and desired) view of university commercialization.
Government may look to universities for a host of intangibles, of which breakthrough inventions are one. It has nothing to do with some idealized notion of research for greater good any more than research as the product development companies are too thick to do on their own, so that Government has to do it for them.
Consider the intangibles of competence, imagination, experience with diverse areas, cultural competence in languages (now being cut by Government–foolishly), confidence, ability to assess claims and sort through data for what is evidence, what is artifact, what is error, what is bullshit. Consider the intangibles of tools–software, testbeds, data sets, recipes, procedures–being validated, made available, taught, and extended. Considerthe *intake* by universities of stuff from elsewhere in the world, to be worked on and advanced, catalyst-style, so one might find that a UK university is advancing work invented at a US university which is based on work at a Kenyan university, that was done in collaboration with Chinese.
Why force everything to be so utterly local and provincial and direct, two years of research producing a stream of pre-product inventions perfectly suited for just those regional companies that happen to be within ten miles of campus? Why that of all things *linear model local commercialization* when the best of university research is so clearly omnivorous, international, discipline indifferent, and random in its particular local outputs?
To sum, why overextend a nice, even clever, working approach (using patents to support investment in new, helpful products) rather than create programs of support and augmentation to the engagement of university research with the big wide world that build on the strengths that these research programs already have–or could with help reasonable develop? Why turn strength to weakness, and then build excuses for those weaknesses or demand Government or industry fix them? Why not just see the weaknesses for what they are–artifacts of a fundamental and repeated mismatch of a limited model of innovation (the linear model–everything triggers on an invention that has to find its way to the money) with something that is being done with great vigor, with lots of exchange (university research), where there are so many other things that might be augmented from that vigor than simply a stream of near term products arising in one’s own backyard via invention that pay a royalty under a patent license? I don’t get that. Why do people try so hard at making the linear model work? When did anyone think that had to be the only and best thing to do to kick an economy via discovery?