Innovation isn’t a simple topic. As Benoît Godin has shown, for much of its existence “innovation” was a negative thing. You didn’t want to be called an innovator, and that’s what you called folks who were loons and threats. In the past 150 years or so, innovation has staged a remarkable turnaround. It appears a lot of the new usage got its traction in science, where new tools and methods opened up discovery and confirmed hypotheses that challenged the prevailing wisdom. Now it is the darling of governments and the great hope for economic vitality, as well as a predominant justification for public funding of basic research. If we fall behind on research, then we fall behind on innovation, and if we fall behind on innovation, then we fall behind on making money, and then we are all poor and enslaved and groaty.
There are even assertions that we are moving from an information economy to an innovation economy. Such assertions are noteworthy not for the odd thought that we may have not really got to an information economy, but rather for the importance placed on innovation quite apart from the impact of that innovation on community. The assumption is, innovation is not just a good thing, it is the foundational thing. It is an economy that trades on and is based on innovation.
Here’s a diagram I have been playing around with to help my thinking on innovation. What follows is a bit long for a blog, so be warned. It’s more like a draft chapter, written over the course of a day to get the thoughts onto the page.
I’ll discuss things, looking in turn at different modalities of innovation–from within, from below, from above, and from the outside, and then I’ll look at how this might provide some insight to technology transfer and research-based innovation.
We can distinguish innovation from invention (needs to be adopted not just recognized), creativity (dull folks can also innovate), change (not all change is innovation, think the seasons and wearing the brown shoes today, going back to a previous way of doing things), and progress (something innovative may not build on previous stuff and may obsolesce it). We see in all this that innovation involves something new to the folks who adopt it, that it need not be universally new (an innovation in the US may be standard fare in Japan), and that we tend to assign innovation to the actions of individual persons or companies. And for a lot of innovation we tend to think in terms of concepts, discoveries, and technology more than personal realizations, fashion changes, and cleverness. We also tend to think of innovation as something made rather than taken away. That is, innovation is recommended and prescribed, not a deprivation or withholding. Prohibition, say, was not innovative.
The emphasis on innovation has led some to seek metrics in inventions, patents, and startups as key indicators of research productivity. There may be some iota of truth in this, but it’s all very difficult to accept by way of assertion or even hypothesis. So much appears to happen by way of innovation without invention, without patents, and without new companies that it appears more that the metric is a kind of demand that efforts be made to create innovation through these means than it is an account that covers much at all of what is happening.
Steven Johnson, in developing his ideas in Where Good Ideas Come From, aims to describe a natural history of innovation. Observe, characterize, and classify. The great challenge is to learn to observe well, to be prepared not only to fit things into the first categories that come to mind, but to be mindful as well for establishing categories that conform to the shape of observations. Daryl Bem works through this sort of stuff in his discussions of nomothetic and idiographic approaches. One might say, coarsely, that rule-based approaches run the risk of coming to demand that the rules be followed, rather than seeing where things fall, and perhaps acknowledging that the conceptual buckets brought to the effort weren’t all that useful after all.
We get this in spades with folks who study the Licensing Survey “data”. The categories, the methods of collection, the manner of reporting–all of it is rather worthless for anything other than a gross account of the activity in an office in a given year. But folks divide the number of patents issued into the funding for research and think they have got something important to say about productivity, when the patents that are issuing may not be the result of *any* funding at all, and if they are the result of funding, that funding is likely spread over a range of past years. The point here is that the nomothetic approach–to accept categories like “invention” or “patent” as significant at all for innovation or “research outputs” and the like–is to have already missed a great deal of what is happening. The big risk for practice is that policy folks armed with the clarity of nomothetic categories can pitch the rationality of it all to institutional folks and technology transfer officers. How can something so clear as the connection between patents and innovation and money be doubted? It makes so much logical sense!
And yet, I argue, based on my experience observing and practicing and considering, that the whole bit of it is remarkably, and rather self-destructively off. That is, university-based technology transfer, in how it goes about things, despite its aspirational statements, its justifications, its moralizing, and its simple bone-hard clarity, is largely in the service of the status quo, and in that service, is largely good for its ineffectualities that prevent unexpected innovation not for its productivity in creating such innovation. It’s a tough bug to swallow. It is akin to that epiphany moment in “Once in a Lifetime” when you ask, “My God, what have I done?” But most folks don’t go in for such moments if they can avoid them.
In this vein, I present a description of four kinds of innovation that I’ve observed, and how these array themselves relative to the status quo. The status quo is an amorphous concept, much like innovation is. The status quo is that stuff we expect every day, our habits and what we’ve built, regulations, and the quotidian. The status quo also has its own habits and expectations for change. We can call this SQ’. SQ’ takes in the ways in which the status quo prefers to change. Often, these changes are incremental, involve improvements in the status quo, solving the problems created by other parts of the status quo, and promoting efficiencies.
There is not just one singular status quo, but rather we find local status quos in communities, in companies and industries, among households, and in churches and clubs and sports teams. These status quos combine and interact, and may even settle into a chronic competition, as in the battle between labor and management, or between cats and squirrels.
The status quo likes to change by consensus, by discussion rather than revolution, and most importantly, the status quo likes to keep things largely socially constant at the top. Those that have power tend to keep it. There are therefore some kinds of change that the status quo can’t contemplate. When a chamber of commerce gets together to meet, it doesn’t consider proposals that would make the chamber of commerce useless. When the executives of a company meet, they don’t want to take up decisions that would put them all out of work and send the company into bankruptcy. Government officials don’t think up ways to eliminate their own positions. When one sees that a blue ribbon panel has been assembled, this is a marker for the status quo wanting to ensure that whatever radical thing gets proposed, it keeps in place the status of those who already have it. University administrators–what do they want when they talk of innovation in technology?
In this context, then, what might the status quo mean when it calls for an innovation economy, or transformational change arising from basic research? What does a university administrator expect from something that’s “innovative”? Surely it’s more like “a patentable invention that makes us money” and not “a change in things so dramatic that the university goes away, or I don’t have a job, or have the faculty resign.” No, the status quo likes change, but only on its terms, often in bits and pieces.
We might say, status quo change SQ’ comes from within. If one is within the status quo, then one fights for status, and then uses that status to keep things changing in status happy ways. It’s no good proposing changes that others in power can’t be happy with. Thus, it’s hard to propose a business direction that lies off the “official future”, is different from the “product roadmap”, or varies from the “consensus”. Doing this sort of thing is like admitting not being with the program, on the same page, working for the common good, or being dutiful. In institutional settings, there’s a problem with sticking one’s neck out, having an original thought, not being clued in, and saying anything that isn’t already pre-approved.
I remember a workplace I had just joined where it was made clear that nothing could be discussed in a staff meeting if the decision on it had not been already pre-established by the director. Staff meetings were little stage plays, in which people were assigned roles, and they played them out, leading the rest to the decision that was already taken. To speak against the script–or worse to show one was too clueless to see the inevitable turn of events–was simply to show how feckless one was, and deserving of whatever low status one ended up with.
Another instance: at a recent conference, a participant described the innovation situation at his big-company Silicon Valley research complex. If the researchers came up with an invention or business idea, the company reviewed it. If management deemed the idea to be non-strategic, then the researchers were free to take it out and start a company and have at it. If the idea was “strategic”, however, then the new initiative was started as a wholly owned subsidiary of the parent company with senior company personnel running it. A strategic idea carried with it all the importance of the status quo. The participant’s point was–everyone in research knew the “strategic” ideas were doomed and the only hope was that management failed to recognize one’s work as “strategic”. In essence, the company was deciding between stuff that might change their status quo in ways they could not control or counter, and stuff that looked like it would advance the company’s reasonable, thought-out roadmap. This is what’s behind Strictly Ballroom, of course. No new dance steps if one can’t make money teaching them.
We might call these sorts of activity “innovation from within”. In Geoffrey Moore’s Dealing with Darwin, this would be those things that make money–creating separation from the competition, catching up with the competition, and process engineering to eliminate waste–with the provisio that some sorts of innovation in creating separation may go beyond the planned roadmaps.
There’s a second sort of innovation. Clayton Christenson calls it “disruptive”. It tends to come from “below” the leaders of the status quo. Christensen points out that product development tends to push products upmarket, with more features and better performance, to take advantage of premium price points and the best opportunities for profit. Doing this makes good sense. It is what the shareholders expect. It demonstrates leadership. It gives customers the best possible product. It’s just as products develop this way, including all the details of their technology, premium markets leave a vacuum of unmet needs where the combination of features that the premium customer wants are of little use to the low-end, or where the price makes the acquisition decision moot. In such “overshot” markets, folks make do with stuff that is just good enough. What’s more, they may do this without trying to imitate the status quo and its premium products. This is not about selling jeans in Banana Republic, Gap, Old Navy, and outlet stores, but everyone selling jeans pretty much the same way. Rather, what has the potential for disruption is that just good enough markets may have very different operating models from those of the status quo. It is the difficulty of the status quo in adapting to a different operating model that makes for the disruption. Christensen points out numerous instances of an apparently poorer product–few features, more expensive–pushing out an establish product–and also the companies established around those established products. Thus, solid state memory is pushing out magnetic memory, even though the cost per gigabyte for magnetic is much lower.
We encountered this sort of thing once pushing a specialty atlas. The atlas showed, page by page, different structures in monkey brains. We had it all in digital form and were talking with an interested publisher. They offered to put media in the back of printed versions of the atlas, sell the book form for something north of $100 and give us 10% of the added price when digital media was in the back pocket. So we were looking at maybe $6 per book after losing 45% or so to the distribution channel. The publisher was looking to make maybe $20 per book after costs. The problem was, we were already selling the digital media version for $400 or so each, with maybe a cost of $20 per CD. We tried to get the publisher to see it our way. Why would we give up $380 a CD so we could get $6 for a CD in the back of a printed book? Why not, we asked the publisher, you keep selling the CD for $400, give us $200, and you could give away two or three books with each CD and still make way more than making the book primary and putting the CD in the back pocket. Our editor really could see there was more money in it, but as he put it, there wasn’t any place in the spreadsheet to work it out this way, so he couldn’t do it. The operating model couldn’t change fast enough to triple profits. Meanwhile, the major disruptors, such as Amazon.com, were pushing a new model that made the whole distribution channel obsolete and with it the 45% take for wholesalers, distributors, and local bookstores. Our little monkey brain picture book was just a canary in the coal mine.
Open source is another instance of disruptive innovation that’s just good enough. There’s plenty of extra features in a commercial operating system that an open source OS like Ubuntu or any other flavor of Linux doesn’t have. But Ubuntu has this neat attribute of being free, both of charge and of restrictions, and that means folks are willing to put up with not having a way to stream Netflix in order to have the product. The idea that one doesn’t sell product and still can make money represents a disruptive operating model. File sharing for music and videos follows a similar path.
In some ways, the idea of open innovation is a way of shopping change in models to the status quo. Let go of the IP a bit, aim for reciprocity and collective action over sole control and fragmented, wasting assets. A big challenge for open innovation to get adopted is that institutional roadmaps are mostly constructed from the resources one has, not from ones that might come available because the fluffy hearted executives at the big competitors all have released just what you need into the public domain. Lots of assumptions have to go, even ones that bank on everyone pulling together for an official future bordered by professional, expert risk assessments. With a disruptive innovation, all this comes crashing down.
The do-it-yourself, co-working spaces that are springing up take advantage of this make-do, can-do approach. One does not have to wait for an executive and a financier to decide to send a design to factory. That decision typically requires hundreds of thousands of widgets, all the same, to be produced and sold for a profit. The logistics of setting up the factory, managing shipping and inventory and distribution is intense stuff. The price of the widget has to cover all this, plus those executive salaries and all the database support to keep track of things. But in a co-working DIY space, someone can create enough for one’s own needs and family and friends. No factory required. No expert panel to decide how to maximize profits and minimize price. The law of big numbers doesn’t hold–or, it holds a very different way, as many DIYers see what’s cool and make their own versions from common designs. Mass production without a factory. Very nicely disruptive.
There’s a third kind of innovation. It’s not really a third kind in a categorical way, because it too can be disruptive. This is “high tech” innovation. We might say, it is change that is coming from “above”. Before there was high tech, there were discussions of how technology changed. How did an industry come to adopt new things. Eric von Hippel has documented how innovation gets introduced in different industries in different ways, at different points in a value chain. Sometimes the manufacturer specifies a change, sometimes a supplier makes a change, sometimes a distributor or a user makes a change. A change could be advocated by a researcher, an executive, a sales rep, a guy in the street, a repairman. For the status quo, a lot of management is trying to keep control of the changes that get visibility, so that the product roadmap is met without a lot of bother and waste.
After the technology change discussions came a new term–research intensity. This is the idea of the early to mid 20th century–that by focusing folks on a particular problem, it can be solved. One finds this in university agricultural extension, in the technology build up during World War II, and in the subsequent ramping up of US federal support for university research, led by Vannevar Bush. Research intensity was how radar and bombs and jet fighters were developed. The big challenge was whether one could do the same thing for non-military situations. Thus, the National Science Foundation was a big experiment in research intensity.
Something happened along the way, however, in the 1960s research intensity gave way to “high tech.” Again, Benoît Godin points this stuff out in his work on the history of innovation as an economic term. High tech means the study of exotic phenomena (not algae but the DNA of algae), the development and use of complicated, expensive equipment (Saturn V rockets, supercomputers, electron microscopes, particle accelerators), and the construction of specialized, usually expensive, laboratories. I am not sure the reason for the change. One thought is that expensive, complicated equipment and laboratories would not be readily available to much of the world, and therefore countries that had these, like the US, would have a huge competitive advantage over other countries in developing science to fuel industrial development. Scientists from other countries would have to come to the laboratories to use the equipment, and countries with such stuff would then be able to harvest the best and brightest from everywhere else. At any rate, some of the expensive, complicated stuff was needed to keep building bombs and fighters and advanced radar and sonar and the like, so even if the intensity wasn’t so much there, the technology need was still great, and the competitive advantage appears to have been in moving the research up-technology. One might say, the premium positions in high tech research were those that moved away from existing technologies, products, markets–away from the status quo, with the intent to one day change and dominate the status quo, at least in some of its manifestations, such as weaponry and perhaps, in civil contexts, economies.
One of the key concepts that develops with high tech is that of “dual use”. We have the concept at least as early as Vannevar Bush’s Science the Endless Frontier. The premise of this report is to adapt research mobilization and collaboration among universities, industry, and government to civilian uses to create jobs, contribute to the general welfare, and maintain security. All good things.
Dual use, however, appears to be more particular than this. The concern may have been, with all this public money going into military and space research, what is there for the public. Yes, it’s neat to go to the moon, but for the price, is there nothing to be learned about new technology? So we got space food sticks and Tang–developed in the space program which now has tangible public benefits as well. Dual use has been a problem in a lot of ways. For one, it shows up as a cover for military spending during peacetime. More subtly, in the development of the ITAR regulations restricting export of weapons, dual use meant not only that a weapon might have civilian uses but also that anything civilian might have military uses, too. Thus, the Army recently made wound healing research subject to ITAR regulations because soldiers could have wounds, and soldiers were clearly part of the military arsenal.
We get one further manifestation of dual use, an economic one. This use suggests that not only does high tech promote military superiority by better products able to compete with impunity, but also in civilian settings, superior products will allow the economy that possesses those products to dominate those economies that do not. One might say, high tech is strongly aligned with a kind of economic nationalism, and in this finds common ground with the idea of the patent, which also is a nationalist tool to secure rights to practice new technology. High tech takes the idea of competition to research, where it has a rather bothersome effect on technology transfer.
High tech presents two problems for university-based technology transfer. First, it involves specialized tools, which is fine if one is observing and discovering, but not so fine if one is trying for production and invention. That is, high tech when it lacks something particular to start with, like a rocket or network to pin things on, is efficient in supporting more research but not in finding anything profitable that private companies might manufacture and sell. If the tools and facilities are expensive, then only the biggest companies can get into the work, and only then if they are subsidized by the government or find some way to make a whole lot of money to repay their investments. For that, they likely need monopoly positions for extended periods, like a few decades.
The very things that make high tech internationally competitive as research–expensive and difficult stuff–also makes high tech hard to relocate into the private sector. There may good reasons to do so, or at least try, but no one should expect the work to be easy, or cheap, or something folks can do by trying to license patent rights. The implicit competitive element of high tech creates an additional problem involving collaboration. It’s one thing to invite in all the best scientists and have them work on your home turf. But when it comes to new ideas, especially inventions, it’s still nationalist competition. Call it invention capture. The use of the patent system to promote use sounds wonderful. The dual use concept is given full play. Here is all this expensive research equipment and now a mandate to put it all to work for the public good. But the patent is a national jurisdiction. The mandate can also be read to mean: file patents so that those in other countries do not have the benefit of our expensive research without paying a premium for it. The patent, whether obtained at home or abroad aims to connect the government’s investment with the economic advantage of its nationals. It’s a deeply competitive model, using monopoly positions to secure economic advantages.
Again, this is all understandable. There is nothing illogical about it from the point of view of funding, competition, and playing the game to win. From practice of science, however, one sees a tremendous restriction on collaboration, reciprocity, and exploration. Why study something that someone at another institution has patented? Why bother? And if one does study and improve, and file patents on those improvements, now there are two universities out competing to find industrial partners, in competition with one another, and potentially blocking each other at the same time–not so much for research (though I have encountered US university administrators that will not rule out suing other universities for conducting research using their inventions)–but for any kind of systematic use. It is as if high tech patenting puts a 20 year halt on mutual efforts. This appears to be the case with nanotechnology, for instance, where the rights situation is so fragmented and obligated by so many different organizations that it’s best to let the patents burn themselves out over 20 to 30 years and then move in to pick up whatever pieces still make sense.
For technology transfer, then, high tech means licensing “down” from elite and sophisticated facilities to nominal ones aiming to run efficiently and profitably. In some cases, this means attempting to skip scale up, as if Boeing could have built a 747 directly, without having started with a lot of smaller, less complicated aircraft, or Intel building a chip fabrication plant on today’s scale, without ever having built one before.
We might find that high tech, as a specialized kind of research intensity, is poorly suited to innovation. From time to time, it produces a spectacular result beyond its own objectives of rockets and telescopes and satellites and superconducting supercolliders, such as MRIs or LCDs or CPUs. Most of the time, however, it produces a kind of accidental complexity that has no prospect of a pathway into private production. No amount of marketing or innovation model or patenting is going to change that.
There is one further kind of innovation. Again, it is not complete category but shares characteristics with others. This is innovation from the outside. I call this Grendel innovation, after the monster in Beowulf that attacks Hrothgar’s hall and creates all manner of angst. This is innovation in its historically approved condition, viewed as a threat not only to status quo business but to all that those empowered by their status quo. This sort of innovation is the object of fear, scorn, abuse, and active effort to suppress and destroy.
In the world of business, innovation from outside might involve breaking the rules of fair competition, product safety, taxation, licensure, and corporate responsibility. In culture, such innovation may be outrageous or offensive or disrespectful. In technology, it is the world of loons and cranks, where one cannot tell the “legitimate” technologist from the goofball or flake. Innovation from the outside runs not only against the experts, but against everyone who happens to think the experts are the best thing going, even when they might disagree with each other.
Yet outside, grendel innovation is also a source of important ideas, and things that were unthinkable, like separation of church and state, and some that still are, like separation of science and state. Grendel innovation involves paradigm shifts, incommensurate language, people seeing things in such ways that no amount of exchange of facts and qualifications can be persuasive or reach a compromise. Grendel innovation obsolesces whole categories of problems and issues and opportunities, replacing them with a new set. In this, grendel innovation shares with disruptive innovation a kind of threat to the status quo. But where disruptive change from below works within the same framework as the status quo but retools the economics, grendel innovation changes the framework of the status quo. One speaks in terms of revolutions and conversions, not advances and insights.
When the European settlers moved west across America, almost everything they brought with them was grendel innovation, transforming geographies and ways of life. It can look like on-line courses substituting for universities, or the creation of synthetic life, or the tractor replacing field labor, the dam replacing fish runs with hydroelectric power.
Grendel innovation works outside of existing markets and doesn’t look incremental. It appears more like plate tectonics or evolution, and once we have adopted, most of what we see is what is old-fashioned or discredited. Thus, while 3d printing has its own markets and manufacturing, it also has the prospect to undo the role of the factory operating at scale. Within the 3d printer community, that might seem like a pretty keen thing, but for folks with investments in factories, and for governments that have staked economic growth on attracting factories, 3d printing may soon emerge as a threat.
One of the interesting things about grendel innovation is that it does not have to be a bad thing. It’s just that from within a status quo, it’s likely to be the thing that can’t be proposed from within. The status quo has a tough time considering stuff that doesn’t track the regular flow of things, as well as the SQ’. In a way, this means that the status quo gets trapped with itself. Change from the outside can be one of the most enabling ways for organizations, institutions, regulatory schemes, and world views to adopt innovation.
Let’s look at the diagram again, this time with regard to university technology transfer activities. We might see two clear places to play. The first is high tech to the status quo. This is the classic effort to push basic research inventions into use. It is one of the most difficult things to do, either to pull the status quo up into high tech resources or convert something high tech into an economical implementation. One might go so far as to wonder whether high tech research generally is a useful source of patent-based inventions. That is, one might ask whether the use of the patent system in the particular context of high tech is a generally good thing. It would appear that there’s a deal to be had every few years or so at any research institution with a robust basic research program. If this is the case, then the biggest challenge an institutional program looking at every invention is to leave most of them alone, even when they appear to have “commercial potential.” Instead, criteria other than “potential” need to be developed, where the trigger is not invention or patentability or commercial potential. The goal is not to motivate the institution to invest in patents but rather to limit such investments.
If we turn to innovation from within, we quickly encounter the problem of IP in the industry sponsored research agreement. The industry position is bi-modal–either a royalty free non-exclusive license upfront or ownership, as one would have working with a contract research organization. The university position, however, is that the sponsor can negotiate a deal at market value when there is an invention to negotiate over, as if the sponsor hadn’t been involved at all. That is, the university position, at least in the US, is to treat industry research as if it were high tech basic research.
It’s quite the disconnect. In this context, “negotiation” for the university is to try to force the industry sponsor to accept a transaction that is entirely unsuited to the proposed relationship. Some companies give in and accept the arrangement, but many others find the situation so dysfunctional that they walk away from university collaborations altogether.
The problem arises not so much from companies being disagreeable and selfish, but rather a failure of the university to recognize these two different kinds of innovation. Certainly there can be overlaps, where basic research funded by the government is also supported by one or more companies. But these overlaps do not establish the rule that the transfer relationship anticipated with high tech is equivalent to the transfer relationship that would come about through industry sponsored research.
From this examination we might propose that a research university needs to have two distinct transfer policies, and perhaps two distinct offices with autonomous operating practices to take into account these two different modes of innovation. Rather than trying to conflate these modes by abstracting or compromising one or both in the name of efficiency or consistency, the proper thing to do is to recognize the differing transfer modes and deal with each on its own terms.
Turning to disruptive innovation, we find a new set of challenges for institutional IP management. While the discussion between high tech and innovation from within has to do with different relationships to the status quo via ownership claims to IP, disruptive innovation may not even present as something profitable to engage in. An institution may ask, why file patent applications on technology for which the operating model is not clear and may not either rely on or respect intellectual property positions? Indeed, why?
This is one of the most consternating things about university technology transfer attitudes concerning IP. In high tech, one argues that taking a patent position is necessary to attract the investment needed to convert complex and generally unknown stuff into broadly useful if not profitable technology. But in disruptive technology, the defining advantage may be an operating model that the status quo leaders cannot adapt to, meaning that the disruptors do not see patents as particularly useful. The problem for the university transfer office is that rather than adapt along with changing operating models, the office instead tries to enforce an IP model. The university insists that disruptors use IP, adopt conventional selling techniques, or face refusal to license and infringement claims. That is, once the IP model is in place on the argument that some companies really do want this model, the office finds itself compelled to insist that all other companies must follow this same model. Disruptors, for one, almost by definition, will not, and if the university does not adapt, then it becomes an antagonist to disruptive innovation, a kind of defender of the status quo incremental and official innovation rather than supporter of tranforming innovation.
How does a university deal its IP to disrupters? Not only do its patent positions not matter much, but also the disruptors can be viewed as potential threats to the well being of the status quo companies that make big donations and come to job fairs. The one area in which disruptors appear to have got university attention is venture backed start up companies. For nearly a decade, the primary venture exit has been to sell new companies to the status quo. Rather than disrupting the status quo, the venture aim is to threaten to disrupt a line of product or market development. There’s not much actual disruption involved; it is more of a speculation.
For other disruptors, the university may appear to be too strongly aligned with the status quo, reflecting institutional sensibilities to take IP positions, seek monopoly commercialization deals, and make money from licensing for sales. An open source software project or a project based on informal arrangements will find little support from a conventional university technology transfer office. One might even expect that disruptive innovations may target university research directions as much as anything. Disruptive innovations may have little interest in high tech complexities, claims for research “potential” that barely interests even the status quo leading companies, or the advice of blue ribbon panels of experts who ignore or waive off the just good enough stuff.
Yet again we find the need to multiply the programs that a university deploys to deal with intellectual property. For disruptive innovation, the university needs to focus on making IP broadly available without demands for particular operating models, submission of business plans, instead using public licenses that help to create platforms and libraries of tools that can be drawn upon without formalities or preconceptions about what a “good” use should look like. If a university wants to make money, it will find income in offering services to support technology development (training, open research, demonstration, validation) rather than insisting on licensing of IP.
From this examination of innovation, we arrive at these points:
1) universities must rig to deal with multiple forms of innovation;
2) for this, universities need to have two or more IP policies and associated technology transfer programs;
3) high tech innovation, while receiving the most government attention, may not be the most productive source of innovation or contribution to community;
4) disruptive innovation, being non-institutional and operating outside the business models and expectations of established companies, requires an institution to be much less the institution and much more a contributor; and
5) the markers for innovation vary with the sources of innovation, as do the relationships by which a university and its personnel engage community, and no singular IP policy and practice can possibly serve more than a small portion of the opportunity with anything approaching effectiveness.