Geoffrey West in Edge 343 (WHY CITIES KEEP GROWING, CORPORATIONS AND PEOPLE ALWAYS DIE, AND LIFE GETS FASTER):
“Well, Google is a bit of an exception, because it still tolerates some of that. But most companies start out probably with some of that buzz. But the data indicates that at about 50 employees to a hundred that buzz starts to stop. A company that was more multi dimensional, more evolved, becomes uni dimensional. It closes down.
“It’s not surprising to learn that when manufacturing companies are on a down turn, they decrease research and development, and in fact in some cases, do actually get rid of it, thinking this is “oh, we can get that back in two years we’ll be back on track.”
“Well, this kind of thinking kills them. This is part of the killing, and this is part of the change from superlinear to sublinear, namely companies allow themselves to be dominated by bureaucracy and administration over creativity and innovation, and unfortunately, it’s necessary. You cannot run a company without administrative. Someone has got to take care of the taxes and the bills and the cleaning the floors and the maintenance of the building and all the rest of that stuff. You need it. And the question is, “can you do it without it dominating the company?” The data suggests that you can’t.
I want to take this toward innovation administration, which is almost an oxymoron. Let’s call it an abymoron. A kind of moron dullness (administration) being applied to something that tends to be antagonistic to most administration.
Malcom Gladwell makes a similar observation in The Tipping Point about what happens at a scale of about 150 people. Beyond this, things start to get opaque, we can’t remember names, we find ourselves using a different sort of thinking. Our social expectations change. Our modes of operating change. Administration starts to look attractive.
Not everything is linear. Scale teaches us that. At different sizes and volumes we encounter substantial changes, phase changes, like water becoming ice, or disappearing as vapor.
In innovation administration, it appears that more is considered better: more disclosures, more inventors, more patents, more licenses. The thought is, this more on more shows more creativity, more innovation, and produces more money (wealth, value, vitality, whatever). All this seems simplistic. I don’t believe it–and that’s because I don’t see any sign that it is true.
Further, I see signs that “more” is not true, or at least not relevant, when it comes to innovation administration. First, more means more triage, more effort to find signal from noise. More means more variation, more different things to be competent with. More means greater volume, so less time for someone to pay attention, follow up, or stay involved. More also means greater distance–at some point, each invention is a data point in a big graph, and one talks about portfolio of children, rather than a niece or nephew. It’s the law of big numbers–meaning, impersonal, detached, manipulative, but needing “success” out of only a bit of it to feel “successful”, no matter the waste and disappointment among the rest of the “portfolio”.
It is this transition to volume thinking, to the phase shift in scale, that universities run a huge risk of creating a program of administration, putatively created on the occasion of innovation, but which actually works against innovation because it must see things in volume, at a scale that requires a phase change from one-on-one to one-for-many. Can you do it without dominating the company?, without creating comprehensive, compulsory, systematic IP policies and procedures, so that everything remains “fair” and “consistent” and under the proper “control” of “authorized professionals” standing in place of the hopelessly incompetent research personnel coming up with great ideas.
In this depiction, one gets the glimpse that even “fairness” in the hands of administration has transmogrified into an attribute of administration, whatever it was before the company folks stepped in. Perhaps innovation only becomes fair when it ends up in a bureaucrat’s “portfolio”.
I see three alternatives. One, the bureaucrat treats everything “equally” and then is always overburdened with work, lacks resources, blames the funding gap and the innovation capacity of others. This is bad because it is definitely sublinear–everything makes great progress, but only “under the circumstances”.
Two, the bureaucrat focuses on a few things while holding the rest hostage just in case a) the bureaucrat runs out of things to do and b) someone would otherwise become successful and make the program look bad. Doing so may result in “success” for certain technology, and that “success” may then be attached to the portfolio and the office as a whole. It only takes one big deal every decade to do this. In fact, if one cultivates good will with companies and entrepreneurs, they probably would do this for you without bureaucrats at all. They want to see your university successful, all without your hiring trained bureaucrats to drive the issue.
The problem with this second alternative is that it ties up a whole lot of stuff in the portfolio that wastes away. Just because the office is successful (look at that income!) does not mean that most of the portfolio that sits unlicensed is also successful.
One might go so far to say that such a situation is most unsuccessful, especially in light of Bayh-Dole, which requires diligent efforts for *each and every* invention claimed by a university under the standard patent rights clause in *each and every* funding agreement. There is no portfolioing in Bayh-Dole. Being “successful” once a decade, in one out of a couple thousand invention reports, does not meet the objectives of Bayh-Dole with regard to everything else that’s claimed, and sitting, and wasting, because no one can get to it, and because, well, gosh, er, look at that income!
The third alternative. Respect the phase changes of scale. Stay under the natural limits of social engagement. Don’t expand beyond the carrying capacity of innovation behaviors. Don’t force policies to adopt volume practices, to converge on the typical as if it were “normal”, so that one is not authorized to act on the atypical (that would be inconsistent and “unfair” and change policy and thus be an abrogation of policy), and indeed volume policies cannot tell whether something is atypical in a crucially good way or in a crucially dull way.
The purpose of “training” in such a system, by the way, is to try to move things toward the typical, so that things stay “normal”, that is, everyone thinks the same, follows the process, makes the system “work”, helps the office become “successful” (meaning, spending less time on those inventions being taken hostage in the portfolio).
The thing about “inventor-own” policies is not that inventors always know better than anyone else (though they might know more than university administrators, and university administrators might know a whole lot less than other people the inventors might know). We can move even beyond the simple observation that an inventor-own policy is essentially a policy that’s not a policy, since under US patent law, an inventor owns his or her invention until there’s a patent bar or the inventor assigns title to another. What inventor-ownership tells us is to respect scale, to stay below the volume threshold. The idea is, build the social and technical network that motivates the very next step in the idea development, which may mean abandoning the initial version of the invention for one or five or fifty variations on the theme. The idea is, work to scale the invention in the context of surrounding technology, rather than working to scale the IP program in the context of many competing claims on time and fairness.
The angle on university policy for innovation then is not one in which there’s a general statement of the public good, a demand on all inventions made in university programs, and a handing these over to administrators, and an income sharing schedule if the hostage inventions happen prove productive at some later date, nothing assured of course. No, instead of this, one creates a policy that limits scale. It does so by starting small and staying small. Intake is what is offered, less what is not well matched to the expertise of administrators and available resources.
In a conventional organizational IP model, the first move is to disassociate an invention with its inventor. This is done by requiring assignment of title to the organization. The theory behind the demand really doesn’t matter–duty as employee, written into funding contracts, use of facilities, conflict of interest, you know you don’t know what to do next, saving the public from the selfish greed of inventors, fairness to non-inventing employees, resolution of disputes before they arise. What matters is that the disassociation comes by demand.
Next, the invention is associated with a program of IP management. It becomes part of a portfolio. It is written up as a thing offered for sale, for a licensing transaction. It is imagined as product, as something of value. It may be a sow’s ear, but it is proposed as a silk purse. From there, the organization hopes for a transaction, but usually does not get one, and makes the best out of the deal a decade by covering up the reality of the income with a conflatulation of metrics: this many inventions, these patent applications, these patents, and these licenses all lead to, gosh, just look at that income! But, of course, most of the income is from one or two deals, and the rest of the licenses are letter agreements for review, options that may or may not be exercised, royalty-free non-exclusives granted in research agreements, and the like.
To work the other way, to stay out of sublinear administration, to avoid starting to kill the innovation, one needs a policy that works against policy, that clears the way for research teams to work informally, competitively as well as collaboratively, to frame their own breakthrough networks, with the expectation that most of these networks will not and should not pass through university controls. Whether these networks involve invention brokers (like Research Corporation or a research foundation) or involve companies (start ups or established companies) or involve DIY uptake by community or involve development by other research teams at other organizations does not really matter. If one assumes a world richer than one’s experience, and richer even than one’s imagination, then the possible ways that an innovation comes about will always be greater than the ways that one could plan in advance for innovation. A policy that prevents folks from planning in advance, from creating a system that is then enforced on everyone to be fair, consistent, and supportive of the authority that created the system–that’s the policy on innovation that a research organization needs.
One may still have an office of technology transfer, technology licensing, industry liaison, alliances and collaborations–and even more than one of these. For research organizations, it may in fact be essential to have expertise in intellectual property, in new venture formation, in research contracting, and in open innovation. How that expertise serves research, science, community, and industry is everything. If the essence of technology transfer is that technology within an institution gets out to others, where it is adopted and used, then the first step is not to force it *deeper into* the institution by claiming ownership, disassociating inventors, and assembling it into a portfolio of inventions.
Instead, one creates “projects” that allow a research team and its collaborators to manage the IP they produce or acquire by pushing back on the expectations of a policy that claims organizational ownership and control. A project becomes the start of a breakthrough network, or more nearly, becomes the acknowledgement by the institution that an inventor or research team or group is working on something worthwhile and it could become something if the institution provides support for its development while keeping it associated with those that have created and recognized it in the first place.
One might call such projects “mircocommons”–the first sparks of social engagement around something new. What such microcommons need are participants that contribute, provide resources, move things forward. Consolidating ownership may be one such step. But it is done voluntarily by those involved, in exchange for something of value they mutually accept. It is not done by compulsion, by a policy decades old, where someone decided what the deal had to be, and imposes this deal through orderly “administration” on everyone ever after. There’s no vision for innovation in such a pre-formed arrangement. There is only a lingering dislike of innovation, put in the format of public service, made orderly, and given over to administrators to process.
The excitement in innovation happens when things are free of the university, or if the university is involved, it is because a request has been made (and accepted) for its involvement. A policy, then, that authorizes the use of university resources to assist private parties that request assistance with inventions, with special attention to those folks who are affiliated with the university in some way (employees, students, alumni, visitors, donors, collaborators, and the like)–that would be a good policy to start with. Essentially, a university IP policy becomes the policy that permits a city of innovation to develop. One does not control such a thing, but one may contribute to it. That’s the tough lesson for IP administrators. Innovation is not consistent, is not fair, does not follow prescribed rules and processes, is incredibly more rich than past experience (especially of administrators), and scales in ways that keep it oxy and not moron.
As oxy-sharp it scales into innovation cities with increasing opportunity. As moron-dull it becomes part of an institutional portfolio of assets duly severed from inventors to participate in administrative processes like Linear Model licensing.
Cities of innovation! Wouldn’t that be a place to be! What a great opportunity for universities to rethink their policies, put talented people on their oxy edge of gruntledness, and excite whole communities with the prospects for doing new things. It’s possible, very doable, and takes only a little courage to invest the future to the unimaginable richness of the possible in the world.