Over at TT2.0, Melba Kurman asks if university technology transfer is under-resourced or under-achieving. Melba raises very good points about the debate, including the efforts of the Department of Commerce to solicit input about technology transfer, which then just sits, and the problem of “role bias” leading folks to plump for whatever happens to be their best line of self-interest.
In addition to the “underachievers” and the “underfunders” there is something else going on. My sense is that American university tech transfer, the way it is set up now, is operating about as well as it can, and in many places it is underfunded to do that. More money would no doubt help underfunded schools achieve their maximum possible outcomes, which would be like one or two patent license deals that matter every ten years. This appears to be the resonant frequency for the compulsory, early-institutionalized accumulate to commercialize portfolio model of research invention management. If one wants programs on this model–in a way, it is the success of Neils Reimers’ approach–then Stanford and MIT as doing it as well as it is going to get. Their offices are impressive, their people professional, and their expertise unmatched. They are at the peak of it. Take in 300 inventions a year, produce two or three meaningful deals a decade for the effort. Those deals carry the portfolio financially, and that’s the success that everyone cares about and envies. What happens to the rest?
If you are not in the heart of a region of significant investment capital, don’t have a major deal in hand giving you a patent budget of $3m or more per year, and are not sitting on top of a half billion or better dollars per year research rocket, then your results might not be quite the same unless you have got a lot more money than you probably will ever get.
If folks want better performance out of university research, then they will have to add additional approaches. Not fix what is there (doesn’t need fixing), not reorganizing it (won’t change the outcomes and postpones the realization); not dismantle what is there and replace it with some other singular approach (the point isn’t to dominate one approach over others, even for administrative convenience), nor even spread around different singular approaches at different institutions (which at least would demonstrate the viability of programs tailored to local conditions), but rather cultivate multiple approaches within each institution.
Some of these approaches are not new at all–they are old, half-forgotten and still quite viable approaches. Some are very new–at least for university IP offices–such as open innovation. Some approaches do not require any institutional funding or action and therefore one simply no longer would ask whether these programs are underachieving or underfunded. Thus, just as some universities have startup activities, licensing activities, and industry liaison activities, the approach would be to push IP decisions into *all* of them, not locating them centrally.
We might go further and ask whether the role of university research itself has been mispositioned. In almost every university development of the theme, university research is declared the starting point for innovation. Tech transfer is depicted as a bridge from research to commercial activity, which does not start until investors have been induced to license patent rights. The reasons given why this bridge does not work are also well practiced: 1. funding gap, 2. university culture 3. lack of innovation capacity, 4. lack of funding, 5. need for standard template agreements. While the bridge does sometimes happen–and mostly because talented people have been put up to the mission to make it appear to happen as often as possible–which is not all that often, actually–it certainly isn’t the only thing happening.
Innovation is doing its thing, research or no, IP office or no, and it is just as likely, don’t you think, that innovative ideas pass through the university on their way to market, interacting with a student here, a staff scientist there, a communications professor over there, a lecturer in biophysics here. Innovation is not limited to credentialed authors in archival journals. Ideas bounce around, seeking activity wherever they will. It may be that the last thing you would want to do is to try to capture and institutionalize with legal or policy controls any–or at least most–of this, and certainly not as early as possible, and perhaps never by way of compulsion based on institutional powers put out as a threat to employment and reputation, if not freedom.
In this view of things, research and innovation alike are often non-linear, iterative, redundant, imitative, reciprocal, competitive, threatening, outlying, intertwined, dull and ungainly, and full of hope. It is understandable that folks might want to put some order to it all and say research leads to innovation. And it is the case that this happens. But as Steven Johnson puts it in Where Good Ideas Come From, it would appear that the research that is engaged in networked, non-market activities may have much greater impact than that which is sequestered into a plan for being the starting point for an investor’s monopoly-based fortune.
One might then see underfunded vs underachieving as a kind of Winner and Waster debate. Neither is going to be adequate to do what needs to get done–is getting done anyway, despite the IP office or the debate. Neither spunking up tech transfer offices nor adding more funding to them the way they are is going to get there. This does not at all mean that spunking and funding are not helpful at times.
Much more, however, we need to reduce the cost and overhead and bottlenecks of institutional procedures that themselves come to be more important than the outcomes. It’s like hairdressers climbing Everest. Instead, we need:
- Create/allow choices for investigators and community alike
- Open up comprehensive compulsory IP policies
- Prevent existing IP programs from suppressing alternatives
- Extend IP practices to non-linear, idiographic approaches
- Mitigate provincialism tied to institutional support for IP
For these things, neither spunking up nor topping off will do the job. Instead, fix as in cat, not car. The present nearly ubiquitous approach to technology transfer has been wildly successful at being what it is. Now put new resources into other things. The linear approach will work at its best when it is not the only approach available–that is, when put in a context in which innovation will out, and will in, as innovation will, not through any one version of pre-set institutional categories, policies, and offices.