I was having some fun with that last post. Part of the purpose is to tweak the noses of some folks who I hear had a good time trashing this blog at their recent organizational meet-up. Well, now. Good fun for all in this business. When will I stop mocking organizations that take on unsupported positions that damage inventors and university research and the prospects for innovation in innovation management?
1) when they reform themselves;
2) when they hold public discussions on matters of importance;
3) when they give space to minority views because these are not merely dissenting but may be emerging, and may serve circumstances that vary from the typical;
4) when they present their ideas with good reasoning;
5) when they report their activity with intellectual honesty.
Oh, and when they stop calling for Bayh-Dole to be a vesting statute. Bah! Dolts!
I know, that’s an awful lot of things. And it ran over from five to six things. But I promise I will stop mentioning organizations by name when I think they have jumped the shark so to speak and are no longer relevant to the future. I think, come to think of it, while I am thinking about it, that time has come, and you see, I am not mentioning any particular organization by name. Yes, you have become the Voldemort, er, that which shall not be named of technology transfer.
Here is the part, however, that is serious. There is no white paper from the university technology transfer community arguing thoughtfully why a compulsory ownership approach to inventions is best suited to one or more of 1) the advancement of science 2) the development of research capability 3) collaboration with industry 4) service to the faculty, and 5) the role university research and research outputs play in a national approach to technological change / innovation / economic vitality. Such a paper will have to do more than make a positive case for these. That’s rather easy. Handwaving assertions, a few skewed numbers to show a compelling use of quantitative reasoning, a reaffirmation of the premise, and everything is good. Even I could do that.
No, what it will have to do is to show that the positive case actually happens, that it does not introduce bad things in not only IP practice but also in broader research interactions, and it will have to show that the values and procedures it enables are productive over the range of available alternatives. To do this, writers will have to be very careful not to fall into the simple fallacy of imagining each alternative as implemented in some faulty way and therefore inherently defective. Thus, the alternative to compulsory university ownership is not, say, inventor ownership, but inventors are fools, so thus, ergo, therefore, compulsory ownership is better, QED. For this to be a decent white paper, one has to do better than that. At least cleverly build the assumptions into the model so they can only be discovered by argument later. At least then it’s not so obvious what your motives are.
I understand how expeditious acquisition of title solves a management problem. I see how such practice is widespread in industry, which often adopts a claim everything strategy. I see how taking title plays to a public and some faculty who are coached to worry about how greed could distort the mission of the university, if one really thought that there was a lot of greediness and distortion to be had and that this was a greater problem than most anything else.
I also see how having the entire title enables a monopoly licensing strategy, backing the singular thought that the primary value in a university holding a patent is that a commercialization partner would be induced by the prospect of monopoly power to invest in the creation of product that otherwise would not be made. I see all this, really.
What I do not see, and what I don’t think anyone in the university technology transfer community has made a case for is that any of this is what ought to be the default. In fact, the reason why such a case has not been trotted out is because it isn’t possible. It does not stand up to scrutiny. It makes no sense. Thus, hand-waving, superficial assertions, and bullying tactics are the order of the day. The agenda instead appears to be a race to bureaukleptic, compulsory monopolicy. This, too, I don’t understand in the context of innovation thinking. Why would a single policy covering all research deployment be preferred over a diversity of policies, varying by the nature of the research, the circumstances of those conducting it, the place the work holds within a broader set of collaborative and competitive efforts, and the like? Why would monopolicy be better than, say, universities in a region collaborating by each adopting a different primary approach to inventions so their interactions were more likely to be complementary rather than mutually competitive?
Someone needs to make the case for compulsory monopolicy as the ideal thing for American universities, in the here and now, to be working so hard to achieve. It doesn’t add up. It makes no sense to me.
So, here’s the challenge: folks who are so taken by this idea of compulsory monopolicy, produce a reasoned, thoughtful discussion of why this is such a very good idea. Publish it somewhere. Then let’s discuss.