There are ways of thinking about ownership that make it sound perfectly normal for universities to own inventions made in research programs and to assign administrators the task of managing these, and any patents that issue on them. The further away from the action, the more normal the reasoning sounds. Closer in, the response is bi-modal and then gets all mixed up.
There are rationalizations (explanations that satisfy why things are the way they are) and justifications (reasoning about why things this way are good) and diversifications (acknowledgment of alternatives that exist and can be used), but also there are potential innovations (the things that could be done, given where we are, but generally are not recognized).
Where do new things come from? Is it all just incremental changes in what we have already got, mostly to make them “better” (usually meaning, “more efficient”, meaning about the same for less work)? Or do we re-work the past for old ideas that fell away and should be revisited? Or do we see how things are going and have that realization that steps sideways and says, there’s another way that breaks with these altogether, in the form, say, of disruptive innovation, which hammers spreadsheet thinking and challenges the idea that things will be uniform, with modest hope of improving one’s social standing with an upmarket craw? Or is there something yet more substantial, that looks like a move down the improvement slope of some local maximum, that changes everything, becomes new territory, where the old problems and advantages alike fall away as uninteresting, and we set a new course that isn’t a forgotten old course, and isn’t just a fashionable reworking of what we were doing? Does that sort of thing happen? If so, where does that inspiration come from? How do we recognize it when it does?
It is as if we are from time to time visited by the gods of possibility, dressed in unexpected garb, and the test is to recognize them anyway, and receive them, and to be hospitable, and perhaps for it, obtain a blessing of opportunity. I know, that puts something mythic on it, and we don’t live in such times, so there are no gods of possibility, just financial bottom lines, mission statements that merit the assent of the wealthy and the would-be wealthy, and the presence of a firm, experienced executive hand to make justice serve return on investment, to the extent permitted by the outer edges of the law. Does this hit on it? Or no, is there something deserving in community that is not captured by such a value set? I’ve noted that there is no university IP policy that references delight as an objective. It’s simply not appropriate. Not even the “pleasure of finding things out”, to use Feynman’s phrase. Not even *that* is relevant to a policy that aims to be fair and proper and orderly.
As we look then at ownership, we have to move toward practice to see that university ownership isn’t normal, but rather abynormal, and at the same time, we have to work through a bimodal (or even multi-modal) set of arguments, claims, justifications, rationalizations, and defenses, to figure out which of these holds up and which are just good enough to beat back the inquiry at all. For this, we have to move toward the unknown, and move away from the safety of comparative thinking. It’s easier to compare a bunch of things that all look rather similar, and a lot harder to compare any of those things with something really, apparently, dissimilar. The unknown opens up with engagement not analysis. We can’t much reason from the name “unknown” to its properties the way we can with “system” or “process” or “fair return”–even if we ought to know that reasoning from the name of a thing to the thing itself can be very risky, just as reasoning from the species to the individual may not help much (“dog”, yes, but what is this particular thing attached to my ankle?, how does one reason from “dog” to that?).
By engagement I mean, the unknown must be queried, explored, poked, listened to, read. If one aims to find “best practices”, one is not searching the past, nor the potential, but rather a survey of what people are presently doing. “Best” doesn’t mean: newly emergent, most responsive, best suited to a distinctive local condition. Rather, it means a practice that can be recommended for adoption generally. It means plausible, doable, improving. That in turn means: volume culture, remedy for ubiquitous faults, a market for imitative change. That means: entrenching a practice in the status quo. Engagement is not this. Engagement is working the unknown with a degree of confidence that there is something to learn there, that there is epiphany to be had, that the experiences of the unknown come to be the palette with which the future is painted. We imagine from our experiences, and our experiences appear to allow us to recognize the visits of possibility and transform them into opportunity.
There are plenty of folks who do not want to engage the unknown. Why do that when there are established approaches to follow? Why do that when policy warns one away from dangers? Why stick one’s neck out? Why work harder than expected for something with such uncertain benefits? Prudence warns away from the unknown. Prudence warns, research inventors will do foolish things, like query the unknown, and we, the university administrators, know better than to do that, except in rare moments, when we ask for an exception to policy. One might wonder, is innovation management itself properly constructed as a prudent set of processes to avoid the unknown? That would appear to be the vision. An orderly system, a policy of respect for procedures. Transparency. Committees watching progress. Reports. A web site with technologies for licensing. A line of prospective companies lined up to take their licenses in turn. Bales of money stacked in rooms for administrators to finger and use at need to solve budgeting accidents and to stroke pet projects. Dreamy stuff.
But is that it? Is innovation something “managed” deep in the heart of the status quo, as a university administrator necessarily is? Look around, administrator. All you see are clicking valves and huge waves of impressive pressure. It’s heart all the way down. The heart of the status quo. It may be the heart of an eagle or the heart of a pig or one of many linear model heart chambers of the cockroach. How would you know? As long as it keeps beating, and beating well, it is the beast you serve.
What if innovation arises other ways. It is not managed at all. Or, it is not managed by the heart of the status quo. Or, it is managed by the status quo when it pits itself with itself in a test of wills and dominance. Or, it arises from some other set of circumstances, and later, when we tell stories about it, these stories adopt a narrative frame that gives causes to things, organizes them, and keeps them there for our consideration and memory. And some of us get the idea that the story is not only useful but *true*, and so set up policy and procedures to *follow the story* and repeat it and make life imitate art, and bring order to the world, first by an appeal, and then by policy that separates out those who agree from those who do not, and then a focus on those who do not, starting with those who can be reasoned to change (“training”), those who can be compelled to change (“duty, law”), and those who can be prevented from not choosing (“job action”, “ostracize”, “punish”). And thus the status quo enforces its dominance on the disorderliness by which we live.
There is a truism that in a revolution, that 1/3 of the population is for it, 1/3 of the population is against it, and 1/3 sits it out to see who will win and takes that side when it becomes obvious. The relative proportions may change with circumstances. With university ownership of inventions, it may be that within the university technology transfer community, a majority of technology administrators and perhaps even a majority of faculty would side with university ownership. That would be those for it and those who have decided those other folks are winning. But even a majority of individuals does not mean such a thing is effective when it comes to innovation from research. But it does say which side one is on. Pick the winner, gain some status, ride the opportunity as long as one can. Recruit others. Never look back. Have no past.
Paul Theroux, in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, gives an account of his time in Myanmar. Here, the army runs the country. The army has good things. If one is in the army, then there are houses, food, good clothes, status, power. The army imposes an order on the country for the good of the army. The population lives to avoid the army, a second life that looks away from that power, is miserably poor, but still engaged in the affairs of living, quite apart from the demands of allegiance, and payment, and consequences for having any other ideas. There are two societies, one enfranchised with authority, resources, power; the other, the people on the land getting by, having private thoughts but only in whispers, for fear of being overheard.
One might think, how easy it is to step over and join the army, and have power, and status, and know the agenda, and carry it out. One might think, order and prosperity are linked, and the failure of the rest of the population is the consequence of its unwillingness to join, to serve, to cooperate, properly, to make the system work, top to bottom. In such a society, social justice is the equitable dispersing of scarce resources, but the idea of equitable itself is managed by the status quo. It’s not that anyone desiring to manage what is equitable for everyone else is fit to do so. But no matter, once you are in, you are in.
In the challenges between administrative and academic actions, one sees something similar going on. A recent study showed that while 3/4ths of university administrators who formerly held faculty appointments tended to agree with faculty positions, only about 1/2 of administrators who had not held such positions agreed. Most university technology administrators were never faculty. One might expect, then, quite a disagreement with faculty about what is best. Technology administrators, reporting to administrators, deep in the heart of the status quo. Join the army. Gain a delegation of authority. Link order and prosperity. Link one’s own prosperity to the prosperity of the administrated whole. It’s easy to slip into this mode, and seek protection from the unknown, and to fight against the unacceptable and poorly formed ideas of the faculty, of investigators, of inventors. It’s easy to repeat the justifications for one’s position. They mark the difference in status, and they need only be good enough to end the conversation. There is no point, deep in the bloody plumbing of the beast, to allow a response that would give one pause–there is no good in trying to change the generals, nor to leave the army, nor to use the army’s resources and authority to undermine the army. No, it just won’t work.
That’s the core of the problem, really, in the effort to open up innovation practice at universities, against a broad effort to close it down, make it orderly, make invention move to management, and establish management’s vision at finding value, closing deals, making money, pointing to impacts, enforcing terms, and beating down infringers. Once one is on that road, there is no veering, no doubts. It’s all straight-on and true.
The purpose here is to argue that there is an unknown, mysterious, proximate, uncertain realm. The purpose is to propose that the safeguards that prevent, even penalize, the exploration of that unknown are, for all their prudence and justification, a danger to research, to the conduct of research, to the impact of doing research. The thought is: innovation management isn’t management, it is engagement, it is up against the status quo, or it ignores the status quo, but it does not come from the heart of the beast to do it, and it will not be better for being compelled, planned, organized, or disciplined. If that unknown is the attraction, then there is a different business at hand. There is work to do that can’t rightly be explained up front. There is risk, danger, mistake. There is doing stuff that hasn’t been done before, beyond what one thought possible. This is a world beyond commercial value and market research and triage sheets with boxes for “problem inventor, subtract 3 points” and the like. There is a role for, say, delight.
There is a fine army of patent administrators living very good lives in university TLOs. They work very hard at what they do. They are not about to give up university ownership, and with it (they believe) the status they have. Yet, in this country called university research, is it that army where one really believes the innovations that matter are going to advance? I don’t.
Let’s take on the unknown, let’s sort through the unexpected, let’s give things life not like we read in stories but how it has to happen in the realtime. For that, there is a role for a TLO, and even for the Linear Model. But there are many other roles as well for university research, and roles with value (and money, if money is the thing). It is putting the Linear Model in an appropriate place, and giving freedom to these other roles that the ownership issue in research inventions is all about. That’s the discussion that will open up. That is where this stuff has to head. Live new or die.