It’s been four years, now, that I’ve been writing for Research Enterprise. Over 450 comments, essays, technical discussions, and parody Star Trek scripts later, it’s time to take a look at where things stand. Over this period, Research Enterprise has discussed concepts of innovation, done close reads of the Bayh-Dole Act, worked through the Stanford v Roche case from multiple angles, played a role in the drafting of amicus briefs in that case arguing for a sound interpretation of Bayh-Dole (and in particular that Bayh-Dole is not a vesting statute). We have spent time diagramming Bayh-Dole, pointing out the method of operation that Bayh-Dole uses, and in particular the (f)(2) requirement that most university administrators refuse to implement.
As for university policies and practices, we critiqued the move to present assignments, especially at the University of California and the University of Washington. We reviewed scads of university IP policies, showing how they were almost without exception contradictory, inept, overreaching, and failing in their purposes. We found at the University of Washington what must be the most ineptly drafted paragraph in university IP policy history. For all of this we proposed alternative approaches that would clean up policy statements and bring them into alignment with IP law and federal research policies. We even proposed, somewhat seriously, the use of the dunk tank to resolve certain disputes.
As for broader issues, we have explored free agency and freedom to invent policies, which would restore American university invention policies to their productive pre-Bayh-Dole condition, with opportunities for diversity and responsiveness to local conditions–much of which has been lost in the past 30 years. We have emphasized how the problem is not with Bayh-Dole, but with university choices, led by organizations of patent administrators that have restated, wrongly, the Bayh-Dole Act. Rather than the agent-choice model baked into the real Bayh-Dole Act, we find instead a secret institutional capture model that has been substituted–a model that looks remarkably like the federal agency claim on inventions prior to Bayh-Dole, and which Bayh-Dole was intended to relax.
In addition to this work, we have looked at a variety of academic and blog articles on various innovation issues. We have critiqued a variety of articles that cannot seem to get the facts or the arguments right in Stanford v Roche, and we have expressed consternation that law professors appear fixated with finding a way to change Bayh-Dole into a vesting statute, as if its present agent model is a defect, and in the alternative to cast about for arguments that would make faculty mere drudge employees who owe all their creative work to their administrative overlords. We have looked as well at really interesting work being done by investigators such as Benoit Godin, who is working on an intellectual history of innovation with special attention to econometrics. And we have critiqued a range of template agreements, including the Lambert Agreements and versions of “express licenses”.
The essays have also spent time developing ideas around the mindset that deals with innovation and opportunity. We have looked at questions raised by Taleb in Fooled by Randomness, and by Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow. We have worked through concepts by Moore, Johnson, Blank, and others, working to get at how innovation, the unknown, and the status quo work together, and at odds, as we develop our ideas about how innovation policy and practice might work, and what actually does happen, despite our expectations. For that, we worked through two essays on the history of warfarin, one of the flagship inventions that confirmed the university-agent invention management model. Our conclusion was that good things happen when exceptional instructors with a commitment to their students and their science have access to resources for development of their work over an extended period of time. This conclusion is rather different from the account of the linear model that says that basic research leads to applied, which leads to products and profits.
We have developed the theory of the bozonet, that professionals that lack a sound knowledge of their practice tend to rate their own skills much higher than they actually are and tend to form social networks that exclude threats that would ask for a higher standard and for a better self-assessment. I have argued that these are natural things, to be expected, but that innovation management deserves, if not exceptional skill and insight, at least a commitment to a frank admission of what we don’t know, and the limits of what we are able to do. If anything, such honesty is a proper groundwork for adopting freedom to innovate methods. I have pointed out, as well, how the growing problem of “bad science” is also a problem for university technology licensing, and demands a similar, well grounded honesty with regard to what is claimed as inventive and commercially valuable. At least some of our problems with research stagnation can be traced to bad science, and to university ownership and licensing policies that tolerate hiding bad science behind IP and licensing claims to entitlement and profit-seeking.
We have taken on AUTM in its present instantiation. We have challenged its claims with regard to licensing success, we have shown how its licensing survey metrics suppress actionable metrics in favor of vanity metrics that are offered as a proxy for innovation but in reality only show a gross load of work taken on by a given office. We have called AUTM an inventor-loathing organization, and based on its published statements, we have also called it clueless. Most particularly, we have expressed our outrage that AUTM chooses to disparage rather than engage points of view that differ from the organization’s executive committee’s preferences. While AUTM may provide useful introductions into the world of university IP management, in its political lobbying, it has done the country a grave disservice by building a monoculture of IP practice that has no room for dissenting views, minority practice, or exploration at the margins. As far as I can tell, Research Enterprise is one of the few forums to express this dissent from the perspective of someone with substantial experience throughout the various elements of university innovation practice.
Research Enterprise has provided various drafts of IP policy statements and agreements, including an extended discussion of Frame Agreements as a general strategy. We have talked about how to change points of engagement in research collaboration, and we have discussed in the particular case of 3d printing how university patent policies and licensing practices have screwed over innovation in favor of profits and asserting authority.
In all, we have poked and prodded at a wide range of issues pertaining to research innovation management. I aim to organize material into sections so it is easier to find and read. I also hope to build out new materials for those seeking to make a break from the present dominant IP capture practice and move to open models, to add diversity to their approaches, and to restore freedom to investigators and inventors to work with the agents of their choice in developing breakthrough networks for their own work, and for the work of others. There is still much to be done, and great opportunities to make a difference in the world. Innovation management, and research enterprise in general, has much to do with the outcomes. Creating innovation in innovation management runs against the best practices that university administrators can put forward. It is in the nature of innovation to be this way. And it is this way, in the ordered domain but on the edge of chaos, where we will find the innovations that are truly transforming, regardless of whether they make an institution or inventor rich by means of a patent license.