Vivek Wadhwa’s column at The Washington Post gets at the issues nicely. This is a golden opportunity, he writes, to rethink the university approach to research commercialization.
Bayh-Dole is good law. But the university implementation of it is not good practice. That implementation does not have to be fixed, does not have to be improved, does not have to be better funded. It has to be rethought and rebuilt, with flexibility, with respect for inventors and investigation, with better clarity toward the role of universities in a broader effort toward discovery, innovation, and better living.
It’s no good staying on the road that 70+ universities just told the Supreme Court they want: to become corporate-style IP aggregators at home with the thought that it would be good to strip faculty and other research personnel of all invention rights and just hand title directly to bureaucrats, er, “licensing professionals” so we get monopoly licensing, patent trolling, company puppy mills, and a cat fight with industry. This is not success, no matter how many new technology transfer offices there are and how much money they make.
No. Time to rethink, remake, get it on track.
There is a lot of work to do, a whole lot of opportunity and possibility, and folks with research, IP, licensing, contracting, startup, policy, and economic development skills are going to be in the middle of it, in demand, and having a ton of fun. Have you had fun lately in your university technology transfer job being a guard to inventions serving their life sentence? No? Well, let’s get the rethinking done and make things young and wild and productive again.