Chris Newfield underscores some of the points I make about the linear model from a different direction in an essay he wrote recently for the Remaking the University blog.
If the US can’t get over the hump and start spending real money through public institutions on social needs, our distorted, inefficient private sector is going to keep suffocating public universities, not to mention the public and the economy overall.
Down in the muddy heart of university research leading to public good lies thinking about the linear model, and that fictional “continuum of innovation” which argues, coarsely, that dabs of public money “taking early risk” will lead to dollops of private investment “taking over” when there’s money to be made. Newfield argues there has been “theory failure”: “The government’s role is to give early-stage money to the private sector, and go away.” That is, fund “basic research” and hand off the results, through “licensing” to capitalist speculators, who then will create from these seeds the companies that will provide the jobs and products for society. It is the theory that proposes this that Newfield sees as failed. Markets may also fail, and even markets that make money for their participants may have no benefit to the broader community, and may even be–as in the case of derivatives speculation–a tremendous drain on the wealth of the broader community:
We are trapped in a Republocrat consensus view that public investment is maintenance or waste, while private investment builds the infrastructure and new industries that we need for the future. The exception is the small portion of public funding that goes directly into the system of private capital. Over the past thirty years, university research has remade itself so as to appear as part of a private future-value chain. The logic of this model of small-public to enable large-private investment is that universites can survive on much less public money: the latter can be targeted to high-value activities like biotech or nanotech research, while lower-value activities for the masses, like undergraduate education or non-technological research, can be paid for on a discretionary basis by tuition.
Technology transfer, as positioned by folks like Chancellor Katehi at UC Davis (though she is hardly first or alone on this), is simply the step by which public money feeding university research careers is transmogrified into inventions, patents, proto-companies that will feed the venture capital speculative marketplace. The claim is, this model *works*. The claim is, the theory *is valid*. The rhetoric is, spend lots of money on “research” and you will get economic vitality through this model of institutional ownership, “licensing,” and private speculators despite their self-interest creating a vibrant direction for community development.
If the technology transfer doesn’t work, then this rhetoric is screwed. Thus, we find that technology transfer offices only publish “success” stories. They do not provide data on each invention that they take ownership of–not even that it exists and they have claimed it, let alone when it was licensed or released, and if licensed what has happened since. Further, they have constructed an elaborate apology for how difficult technology transfer is–and there is no doubt that it is a challenging thing to do. But they have created illusory monsters instead of confronting actual ones. Inept, uncooperative faculty. Lack of innovation capacity. And of course, the “funding gap” or the “Valley of Death,” which means that an idea has been presented badly, at the wrong time, to the wrong audience.
Just because you can’t find happy speculators willing to share their upside with an institutional patent monger doesn’t mean the idea is no good. There is a point at which raising funds for a new venture is a huge challenge–but there’s no reason why 1) university ideas have to be rushed to the edge of that desert; 2) that fund-raising has to involve the venture or investment communities at all; and 3) that anything that happens has to result in a cash payback to the owners of institutional patents. These are all just foolish constraints on the system to channel benefits to institutional control and to rationalize why there’s not nearly so much “technology transfer” by way of lucrative patent licenses as the tech transfer “commercialization” rhetoric would have folks believe.
There can be robust movements of technological competence around research activity in universities–call it “technology transfer.” For it to be any good, it has to involve research that is substantive and holds up under independent critique, not just by buddy academics under some half-baked “peer review” but by folks whose livelihoods depend on the science being valid, not merely spun for the next grant by cherry picking data, designing experiments with built-in bias, and throwing around statistics and models without having a clue about the underlying assumptions–where the actual science lurks. Further, for technology transfer to be any good, the methods have to follow the lines of natural history of innovation. These are multiple, diverse, recombinant. What “worked” yesterday may or may not “work” tomorrow. It is less likely, however, to “work” tomorrow if some policy makers decide that everything has to “work” as it did yesterday, by fiat.
If university “technology transfer” cannot show that it contributes meaningfully to economic development, then the rhetoric and those deploying it are discredited. Folks making outright claims for the “success” of technology transfer, and especially of their licensing offices and the linear model, are out on a limb right now. The aspirations that were fresh and full of hope in 1985 were by 1995 conventionally repeated, and now repeated as if true and “settled.”
What folks must see is that even where there are technology flows–that people are teaching other people what they know and applying that knowledge to things people want to accomplish–these are hardly the result of the present institutional, compulsory, commercialization-bent service to the investment community.
Private investment has its role. Patent licensing has its role. But making a linear model out of it does not make a workable framework for dealing with research or with technology transfer or with innovation. Requiring university officials to direct and benefit from each inventive idea makes the linear model even more unlikely to operate.
The compulsory approach to invention ownership taken by universities doing basic research is a fundamental barrier to the operation of the linear model. Even if you wanted the linear model to be the fundamental description of the outcomes of government investment in basic research conducted at universities, you would want to do those things that gave the model the best chance of operating. Demanding ownership of inventions to plug them into a “commercialization” apparatus isn’t one of those things. And yet we find administrators who make a virtue of doing just that, and scores of university officials ready to tell the Supreme Court and whoever else will listen that doing so is a really keen thing that should be the law of the land. Clearly, we have theory failure in technology transfer, here.
Clear away the bad theory and we have uncertainty and challenges. But at least we can then observe, experiment, discuss, learn, and adapt. These, rather than demand, enforce, comply, and maintain a futile consistency, blaming a host of monsters for what doesn’t work.