Technology transfer refers to the movement of capability from one group to another. Three conventional forms are from a developed country to a developing country (send in the tractors, there have to be tractors); from one industry to another (wifi on airplanes!); and from research labs to industry (what universities are fixated with).
We can put some qualifications on this list. First, technology is not so much a commodity as it is phronesis. That is, it is capability, not product, and that capability is a matter of people doing things they are in control of. Transfer, therefore, involves teaching, along with providing the support by way of materials, funding, and permissions to enable folks to practice what they learn. Without teaching, who cares about licensing? Without adoption and use, licensing is wasted, and the money made in licensing is no index of “success”. Count the money when there is practical application, not as payment for rights.
Second, transfer is not the only way technology moves. Technology may diffuse by independent realization. Different groups see the same demonstration, or work at the same problem, or put one and two together, and are able to create similar technology. The adjacent possible is always there, available to anyone. Technology transfer is not a one-way street. New technology may erupt, it may involve back and forth mutual development, it may involve multiple participants each contributing to make something no one participant has the ability to create or control.
Third, when it comes to research technology transfer, pushing stuff out of labs is not the only direction. Another direction is getting things into labs. A third is getting things through labs. A fourth, even, is to prevent things from getting to a lab at all!
Research often needs engagement. In a company, that engagement often is supplied by proximity to things like products and customers. You see right off what needs to be figured out. For universities, this is more difficult, since they operate labs that generally do not have products or customers, and aren’t rewarded for that if they do. They have to be engaged other ways. But they don’t necessarily want to be. So long as a lab can keep getting research grants, the primary goal is to get more and more, rather than getting distracted by things like application or adoption. Such things don’t advance “science”–they just demonstrate efficacy, which was something already claimed along the way.
For labs, the kind of technology transfer that may matter just as much as getting things out, then, is getting things in. We call this the “undersecretary role” for technology transfer folks. I’ll explain sometime. For now, take it that undersecretaries work to find interesting things in the world, and bring them into a lab for examination, for use, for validation. Importing stuff into a lab may be important to how the lab maintains its engagement–not only new instrumentation, but new study examples, new techniques, new sets of issues.
We may add that technology transfer as described above is not primarily about licensing patent rights to monopolists for money. There may be a permission step, but if so it is buried in the exchange. It’s a very special case that one leads with a patent right. It happens. It may be necessary, even, in some cases. But it’s not anywhere close to the primary practices that enable technology to transfer. One can transfer technology without owning any inventions, without any patents. No, the primary practices are around teaching the capability in a new context. That’s what folks need resources for, and recognition for doing, and connections to enable.
A university may have a technology transfer program. And it may have a patent licensing office. And these don’t have to be the same, though they might work together. It is a big problem for a university if a technology transfer program cannot operate because a patent licensing office won’t let it. One of the worst things a university IP policy can do is conflate patent licensing and technology transfer. Another of these worse things is to assume there’s only one best way to do things. A third worst thing is to have a superficial understanding of innovation and technology transfer and think that a university patent licensing office can do “everything”.
Why wouldn’t a patent licensing office let a technology transfer program operate? Because the licensing office may insist that it must lead with patent rights, because it insists on making money, because it insists on seeking exclusive deals if it can, and because it has no particular expertise with advancing research objectives (such as bringing in technology or building standards). A patent licensing office may even be so banal that it does not care about anything other than its own survival–there’s a policy that says it controls IP, and that’s the end of it. Don’t even bother to *think* about privilege. Even so, there are valuable roles for patent licensing offices in the context of technology transfer and university research.
A university patent licensing office need not be a monopoly practice, it need not have a primary goal of making money, it need not be the primary resource for doing commercial deals, and it need not have a compulsory policy with regard to taking title. These need-nots are all things that, when they come about, do so by a decision of the university–and generally, these days, of university administrators. It is a choice.
There is nothing in Bayh-Dole that requires federal agencies to require that a university have a technology transfer office as a condition of complying with a funding agreement or its SPRC. The need-nots are entirely the doing of university administrators, generally with the advice and advocacy of patent marketing folks.
What we need now is to show administrators and faculty the arguments and perspectives and history from which to develop new (meaning, in some cases, old and successful) ways of addressing inventions, ownership, management, and collaboration with industry. That is, we need to recover technology transfer from its narrow implementation as patent licensing from an accumulated portfolio of research originating inventions. We need to free up people to get excited about innovation and engagement and exchange without patent officers rushing activity to demand their programs control. We need to do this before folks grow so accustomed to not being able to do anything for themselves that the patent licensing office has killed off the research excitement in innovation altogether and replaced it with compulsory controls, processes, and institutional thinking.
Good ways to ruin innovation from research:
1) compulsory ownership
2) institutional contracting
3) misallocation of resources
4) lack of choice
5) marginalizing the creative people
Technology transfer depends on creative people, having options and access to resources, able to work to their own priorities not that of administrative managers, and choosing freely to make commitments. These are the conditions under which the urge to transfer technology arises. These are the conditions being destroyed by the monoculture promoted by university patent administrators in monopoly licensing offices.