Chris Newfield, writing in his occasional blog on the woes of the middle class, discusses innovation in a list of the “core concepts of the current system” in the US (where Right/Radical is somewhat equivalent to “Republican” and Conservative means something like “Democrat”):
5. Mutual aid solutions to destructive and inefficient markets for core goods will not return in the United States. Innovation is a form of mutual aid, but the version controlled by the US business system will not recover soon. Having missed creating the “green collar economy” that would have addressed environmental and employment problems at the same time (and wrecked the Right-Radical / Conservative duopoly in US politics), mainstream innovation theory now consists of pep talks about the American Spirit, tributes to Anglo-Saxon law, and the blanketing of every field of invention with patent filings and unending lawsuits. The innovation economy systematically seeks and achieves monopoly or duopoly in every domain (Google-Yahoo, Apple-PC), suggesting low survival rates for invention that does not support plutonomy.
One has to be clear these days, what form of innovation does one serve? Clearly, some university leaders have aligned themselves with the innovation theory that Newfield describes, with the main aim to increase the number of plutonomic faculty members as a necessary “change in culture” within academia, preferably by participating in various forms of institution-approved (if not institution-led) technology speculation, anchored by claims of ownership of intellectual property. Making a puppy mill of faux startup companies is one of the presently preferred ways to do this, especially if it dupes state legislatures to pour more money into the activity on the prospect of plutocrats creating jobs, if not on their way to the plutonomy, then after they get there. But see here for a contrary view, that the rich are not good sources of jobs.
What is the point, one might ask, of independent university research if university administrations have adopted as policy to refer all possible outcomes of that research to institution-mandated plutonomic innovation? Why would anyone desire underling licensing specialists to be dedicated to the nuances and complexities of achieving such innovation? Why would plutocrats even want this? When was it decided that universities should become an institutional means to prevent economic and social diversification by ensuring that all university research findings that can be owned (as well as those that can’t, if any number of university IP policies are to be believed) are referred first and with greatest privilege to “investors” seeking access to the plutonomy, or having already arrived there, to maintain their position in it? Why is “technology transfer” in such a context considered a “success” at all, even when it reports that it is “making money”?
Freedom to invent within a university is important in this context. Freedom permits the deployment of research opportunities, activities, findings, and consequences without the presumption of service to the plutonomy. It is only from within a policy framework already hopelessly engaged in service to the plutonomy that someone would argue that it is unimaginable that any research finding might be deployed for any other reason than service to the plutonomy.
The issue is not therefore whether an institution can aspire to the plutonomy with more resources than any single faculty inventor, but why either would hold such aspirations.
University conflict of interest policies are now being deployed as a means to prevent faculty from teaching or deploying their inventions and other findings without first obtaining the permission of administrators. The presumption is that faculty somehow will not be sufficiently greedy or will be too greedy, or will bungle their greed if left to their own devices. Imagine! a faculty inventor deploying an invention and not making money on it, or making money and not sharing the greater portion of it with the institution he or she happens to be at when a finding is made. Worse: imagine faculty researchers publishing openly and leading change based on evidence, whether they benefit from that change personally or not. Imagine faculty helping their students find a livelihood. Or helping people practice what has been discovered. Imagine research staff doing so. Imagine students doing so. All without any regard for plutonomy.
Thus, the technology transfer office view of “ownership” is framed altogether wrong. We should not be discussing whether university research could launch folks to the plutonomy better via institutionalized specialists or not. We should not even be discussing ways to reach the plutonomy from university work. That’s not the policy issue. The policy issue is how to support anyone who has committed to work at a university and who has become involved in efforts to make changes in the established order of things that contribute to the well being of the public. Some miniscule portion of that effort may go through the plutonomy. Certainly it is not worth basing one’s policy foundations for intellectual property or industry relationships or economic development or the advancement of science or medicine or scholarship.