Why do universities claim faculty inventions rather than offer to accept them?
To put an edge on it, the difference between a workplace and a prison is which side of the door the lock is on.
It appears that currently the great effort of university administrators, legal counsel, and technology transfer officers is to improve the firmness of the claim on title to faculty inventions. I have not seen a single university IP policy revision in the last decade that looked to open up discussions of invention title. These folks are determined to make the first step in early invention dynamics to claim administrative control of inventions. Why is this? What does it mean for innovation arising from research? For innovation that benefits from access to research?
We might list some possible answers.
- Because university administrators can, they do.
- To make money licensing patent rights.
- To create a process to manage uncertainties.
- To ensure every invention gets reviewed.
- To protect the public from unethical researchers who may be biased by money.
- To comply with law or regulation.
- To mitigate risk of double licensing or other contractual problem.
- Because everyone else is doing this; it is the standard practice.
- To prevent later disputes.
- To protect students, staff, and junior faculty interests.
- To divide up revenues under administrative supervision.
- Because doing so is a better way to innovate.
- For convenience, because most faculty choose this route anyway.
- Because a committee recommended it.
- Because other approaches have not worked.
Have I missed anything? Anything compelling for why a university should require title rather than request it? Anything compelling for innovation? For community access? For collaboration? This is where folks out to have it out. There is nothing obvious that claiming title outright by administrations has any benefit for research or research inventions or community innovation. One might say, just the opposite. The burden is on administrators to make a case for stepping in to claim inventions as a matter of policy, as the default, as a condition of employment.
Let’s state the proposition baldly: university demands for ownership of invention are opposed to innovation and damage the public’s anticipated benefits from research. University technology licensing offices that rationalize such demands are working against the public interest. Their arguments for ownership show how far they have gone from offices of creative encouragement to process-bound offices of patent accumulation.
In a more graceful way, one might say a policy demand for title is so efficient that a technology transfer office has to throw its resources at processing all inventions, regardless of their prospects. Doing so shifts resources to intake and away from placement, to triage and review, posting to databases and creating files. Doing so introduces much more noise into the signal of what is important. That is, the efficiency of demanding title is not matched with an efficiency of placing inventions, and that leads inevitably to patent accumulation, increasingly greater proportion of one’s budget spent on patenting unlicensed inventions, and increasingly bringing the technology transfer office to look like its federal counterparts, pre-Bayh-Dole.
The university that demands title outright is making exactly the same demand as the federal agencies were making. And the result is not ironically looking to be exactly the same: lots of patents, not many licensees, and a debilitating effect on innovation.
One might also then add to the list of possible explanations:
- Administrators are afraid they might miss something valuable.
- Folks that don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it.
Forget the door! Where have all the flowers gone? When will they ever learn?