In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, at one strange point a whale and a bowl of petunias come into existence and have only a few moments to come to grips with their situation. In about five minutes, a connection between this bizarre account and invention management will be revealed.
University research changed substantially after the second world war. During the war, it was clear that a combination of academic science, industry engineering, and a kind of gadgeteering dexterity had led to some dramatic innovations useful to the military–among them radar, sonar, computation equipment, penicillin production, um, really nasty bombs. Vannevar Bush describes a number of these in a book that is not read much these days, Modern Arms and Free Men. The book is important, however, for in it Bush develops a view of how teamwork among various groups separate from an establishment, in this case the military, can review problems or challenges, break down the issues, and build something new, drawing on all sorts of practice areas for information, design ideas, and capabilities. In MAAFM, collaboration is not merely government throwing money at “research” and not the government specifying products to be built by contractors, but rather the collaboration is mediated by someone outside the target establishment but knowledgeable regarding its purposes and needs, working at the top. In Bush’s case, he reported to the president, worked with generals, and assembled teams to use science and engineering to innovate where innovation could make a difference.
As the war wound down, President Roosevelt asked Bush to consider how the same approach might be used for civilian purposes. The result was Science the Endless Frontier, a text that more people have read. STEF forms the foundation for the formation of the National Science Foundation, which was proposed as an intermediary between government and the private sector (including state-run universities) for the purposes of advancing research interests. The NSF, in its creation, also sparked a triangle of university leaders that persists even now: MIT, Stanford, and Washington. Bush was from MIT, his graduate student Frederick Terman went to Stanford, where he tutored Hewlett and Packard, created university research parks, and generally set the conditions for Stanford to contribute to the development of Silicon Valley (and thus was in part responsible for the destruction of many orchards in the Santa Clara Valley). The first bill establishing the NSF was introduced by Senator Warren Magnuson of Washington state, who had also previously sponsored the creation of the National Cancer Institute. While there are many great research universities now in the United States, these three got an inside track by their connections in Washington DC. Ground floor opportunities, one might say.
While Bush was successful in getting the NSF started, he did not get all that he wanted. Bush argued that the federal government should not operate its own research labs, but rather fund universities and other independent organizations to pursue science, creating a new body of knowledge from which to draw to develop new things. Instead, the government created more labs and narrowed grants to areas of reviewed work, which is largely the approach we have now–Bush’s vision for new stuff co-joined with a bureaucratic interest in how money is dispersed and accounted for. As a political rhetoric, it “works” but as a “national system of innovation” it is hardly viable. One of the telling points, of course, is that there is no public information on the operations of the program. Yes, we see how much money was awarded, but as a result of the Bayh-Dole Act’s gutting of public accountability, all reports on the utilization of inventions made with federal support are in essence kept secret, exempt from FOIA disclosure requests.
Something else, however, was lost, and that was the sense of teamwork that Bush had experienced and led, and which he hoped to recreate with the National Research Foundation, as he called it. The NRF bore a resemblance to Research Corporation, which used patent royalty income to fund research at universities throughout the country. The NRF (to become the NSF), however, would operate at a much greater scale, and with tax dollars rather than dollars paid by industry for patent licenses. The teamwork that Bush sought is illustrated by George Dyson in Turing’s Cathedral, which recounts the interactions, ideas, and decisions that led to the development of the digital computer. A team of academics, many escaping countries hammered by Germany in the second world war and finding refuge at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, combined with engineers and industry technicians, took up residence in the basement of a building occupied by mathematicians. The mathematicians were incensed by the introduction of people making something. It was no place, they thought, for lowly engineering, let alone mechanical things.
The nature of the Vannevar Bush teamwork was to pull talent of various sorts from its institutional settings, find an institution willing to house the effort, and then connect the team’s doings up with an establishment interest. In Bush’s case, that was the military. What Bush wanted to try next was medicine. To do that, he anticipated that teams would come together from all sorts of disciplines:
The real reason we made such great progress was not bright inventors or clever gadgets. It was the fact that we had thousands of men who understood the underlying science in the field, who skillfully practiced the necessary techniques, who were good gadgeteers. They were in our universities, throughout industry, and in all sorts of queer places in the general population. Enough of them were gathered together and saved from senseless expenditure in tasks far removed from their skills to do the job, all the way from the research laboratory through pilot manufacture and engineering design to mass manufacture and skillful use in the field. We made great progress because we had the background for it. (MAAFM, 244)
That is, the team that forms is one that is outside the institutional duties: the team has a different job, putting the ideas, the technology, the production, and the use together. This is not the startup company; certainly it is not a university lab with a patent licensing to whoever will pay wart attached. In Science the Endless Frontier, Bush describes another characteristic of such teamwork:
Fundamental discoveries unrelated to diseases to treat disease, “and perhaps entirely unexpected by the investigator.” This view of teamwork is not one of experts in an area obtaining all the funding to solve the problems of an area. Further, how might an investigator of diseases gain access to such “remote and unexpected sources” if the universities that host the research take ownership of every invention and try to license them off for money to monopoly interests aiming to make money if the patents on the inventions don’t turn out to be, um, worthless? No, in the presently deployed and apparently widely admired approach, no investigator has a chance of gaining access to such sources of discovery: no university will license its patents to such a person–not wealthy, not a monopolist, not seeking to make product, not willing to pay. Worse if the investigator is part of a team that will work the problem from lab to field. No, it cannot be done that way: each discovery has to be patented, and patents have to be held for license to commercialization partners–even if 95% of them are never licensed, holding back open exchange for two decades. The present approach is entirely opposed to the teamwork vision of Vannever Bush. It’s an affront to what Bush accomplished and sought to extend more broadly.
It is important to recognize how Bush experienced a kind of effective teamwork, displaced from work-a-day employment, free of institutional claims, separated from establishment status quo but engaged with its challenges, funded independently of the establishment to push at it. Research was not funded so that university administrators could snatch discoveries away in order to offer fawning service to the powers that be or in spite to sell off bits of findings to speculators to have a go at the establishment, hoping companies will stumble across some live claims. Bush’s basis for proposing the National Research Foundation was this sense of a new kind of productive teamwork outside of institutional controls, but provided with institutional scale resources, just as was done during the second world war. It has not proven easy to do this. The Navy-sponsored development of the digital computer and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-sponsored internet project comes the closest. Even ARPA’s name bears a nice resemblance to Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Studies, which housed much of the digital computer’s development. Perhaps Boyd’s work on the F-16 comes close, but there he works under the radar of the status quo, and up against not only the Pentagon establishment, but also the defense contractors that had, let’s call it, a close symbiotic relationship with that establishment.
But since then, creating such teams has been scarce, replaced with institutional interests in getting money for contracts, controlling ownership of inventions and discoveries to try to make money, and generally reducing collaboration to contracting such that nothing can be allowed to happen without administrators intruding to make sure the institution gets its cut of funding and dictates the nature of the exchange. It is impossible to over-emphasize the disastrous nature of the institutional contracting overhead that has been created in sponsored projects offices and licensing offices and imposed on the earliest stages of teamwork where something actually useful might get developed outside the initial clutches of the status quo. The asset of value is not the “early stage invention”: it is the “early stage collaboration.” It is the building of a team that can be independent of any institution while being thoroughly engaged with a challenge faced by a status quo establishment. That is the intangible asset that matters the most. That is where Vannevar Bush’s experience was anchored. That is the motivation for government funding not moving through procurement contracts dictated by a bureaucracy. That is what we are driving at here, to the sneers of AUTM about faculty “free agency”–as if university faculty actually want to do what AUTM advocates doing–selling off patents to speculators.
The greatest intangible asset was a team working in an area prepared by excellent scientific training across a range of workers in academia, industry, and the queerest places so that they can do what needs to be done, and produce something new, drawing from remote labs, assembling prototypes, and putting things in the field for use and for production. This sort of foundational teamwork, creating a transient collaboration that scales, is more like movie gig culture than it is anything like institutional processes to secure a pound of flesh from every discovery. The “technology transfer” from such a teamwork foundation–a commons, a project–is a matter of diffusion, not blind “marketing” to investors. The difference is day and night. Vannevar Bush’s past light and AUTM’s present-day darkness. I suppose folks get a choice, except AUTM shouts proposals down any chance it can. Indeed, AUTM has become exactly the kind of “establishment” that Vannever Bush, I would expect, would have argued was part of the problem, and that investigators needed to be free of such restrictions on their work if they were to have any chance of innovating.
Why have not very many foundational extra-institutional teams formed–or at least been recognized–despite all the calls for “collaboration,” all the demands for multi-disciplinary teams and the like? Certainly, the patent-chasing unicorn and rainbows crowd has something to do with it. But there was a deeper problem, and the unicorn and rainbows patent chasers are a symptom of it, an emergent property.
After the second world war, the federal government moved into university research in a big way. Its budget for university research ramped up exponentially in the 1950s and 60s. The bragging rights went to the institutions with the most awards, not the ones hosting the most productive quasi-independent teams. Bureaucracy descended like a long, slow twilight. By 1962 President Eisenhower could worry publicly about the loss of independent research to a military-industrial complex. The federal government essentially bought out a substantial share of university faculty. In doing so, the government also fundamentally distorted the approach to inventions that university faculty had been working out for fifty years, effectively removing or at least unsettling discoveries and inventions from the arrangements that universities and their faculty had been making–a diversity of arrangements, with external agents such as Research Corporation playing an important role in selecting inventions well suited to patent management. Some agencies worked within that system, and some did not. Even the Institutional Patent Agreements distorted the approach by requiring the university to take ownership of faculty inventions made with federal support. At least the IPAs demanded public accountability and set limits to patent exploitation, such as making non-exclusive licensing the default, placing limits on the duration of monopoly positions, and forcing open access if a university hadn’t got its act together within a reasonable period, like three years.
Thus, the rise in federal funding for universities shifted the discovery commons from being halos around university faculty to being substantially shifted to federal government agencies holding patent rights, or rights to patent inventions. By the late 1970s, it was apparent that the federal government had created a new sort of commons, populated by patents on inventions made by faculty investigators hosted by universities, and made available for use rather than, mainly, for “commercialization.” The government may have been doing a less able job at “commercialization” than the university agent network, but the government was not focused on “commercialization”–it was focused on practice. Maybe, even, the government was attempting something closer to Bush’s vision than the university-based invention management agents. The government, however, was comprehensive in its claims on inventions through its funding agreements, while the university invention agent network was highly selective. Thus, the university agent network could be expected to do a better job at “commercializing” inventions–that was what it had been cultivated to do, within the framework of academic purposes, expectations, and values.
What then did Bayh-Dole do? We have discussed elsewhere how Bayh-Dole gutted public accountability for private exploitation of federally supported inventions, and how its wording was exploited by patent-chasing university officials to dupe faculty into believing that federal law required universities to own faculty work when supported by federal funding, or, in the alternative, that federal law granted university officials the right to take ownership of any invention they pleased, or that in the alternative, federal law prevented inventors from assigning to anyone but the university, or if the university declined, to the government. That part was a big scam pulled off with some fine work by legislative staffers, well-placed university patent attorneys, a front organization co-opted for the purpose, and with the support of the biotech industry, which hated the federal government’s ownership policies more than it feared licensing negotiations with university officials. Silly biotech industry folks.
But the underlying Bayh-Dole Act, which was and is still pretty good despite the poisoned parts, was also getting at the problem of the federal commons. That problem was not that the government failed to “commercialize” patents, but that the government had distorted the creative activity that had been taking place in universities, drawing a massive portion of creativity into a federal bureaucracy where it was difficult to get at for any reason other than contracting with the government to do more research. In other words, the government bureaucracy had come to embrace the funding to universities, not as a loss of control, but as a way of buying out anything that might compete with agency roadmaps. Boyd’s problem, but writ a lot larger. Bayh-Dole got at this by fundamentally changing the federal commons from one in which the government obtained ownership of inventions made by faculty using federal funds to one in which the government obtained only a license in those inventions for government purposes, unless the inventors failed to license to an approved invention management agent and the agency refused to allow the inventors to retain ownership of their work.
Bayh-Dole diminished the federal commons that had sprung to life for thirty years, a kind of whale created in the atmosphere above the universities, that had struggled to figure out just what it was supposed to be doing. The beneficiary of this change was not the foundational teamwork envisioned by Vannevar Bush, but rather something slowly ruinous–institutional control of another sort, that of the university-as-employer rather than university-as-host. Instead of the federal government running an invention commons, the university patent officials secured (through the Scam) a monopoly position on those same inventions, used that position to force changes in university policies and employment conditions, attacking academic freedom and especially attacking the dominant position of Research Corporation as a preferred agent of faculty inventors nationwide. The distaste for “free agency” at AUTM is a distant echo of the fear of competing with Research Corporation to get access to faculty inventions.
The university bureaucracy stepped in and appropriated the invention rights pulled back from the federal government. Instead of federally supported inventions moving into the existing invention agent network when faculty inventors decided that commercialization was something to pursue and a chosen agent agreed, these inventions became institutional property and faculty inventors were construed as unethical if they attempted to release inventions without giving university bureaucrats the chance to chase rainbows and unicorns with them first. Even if the bureaucrats were successful, financially, in their efforts, the damage to the university commons has been substantial. The early institutional patenting of faculty inventions and discoveries all but ensures that Vannever Bush’s idea of extra-institutional teamwork cannot happen. The only collaboration that is tolerated is one defined by institutional contracts for grants and licenses. If the institution does not benefit, then the activity is unethical and against the public interest. What a strange reversal of the role of faculty investigators!
David Teece in 1986 wrote a paper describing the challenges of technological innovation. Teece described the competition among innovators, imitators, and infrastructure for their share of any possible value of an invention. Matt Ridley, in The Rational Optimist, describes how priestly castes repeatedly move in to take control over innovative work and eventually suffocate it. Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm talks about how engineers inevitably lose control to the marketing bureaucracy. University administrators like to think of themselves as innovateurs; it is a delusion. They are infrastructure grasping at value, even before the value has become apparent, even before the actual value of collaboration–productive teamwork–becomes apparent as an intangible national asset. Folks have wondered recently about stagnation in American research. Bayh-Dole is a big part of the problem, not because of what the law says (apart from the lack of public accountability), but because the law allows the university bureaucracy to throw a sucker punch at faculty, preventing the development of the foundational teamwork that Vannevar Bush hoped to cultivate.
It’s still possible to get to Vannevar Bush’s vision, even with Bayh-Dole. The problem is still the huge distortion of federal funding over the directions and outcomes of faculty research. That’s the whale. Maybe it will figure things out. The establishment, however, is the secondary problem that keeps popping back up, like a recurring nightmare. If it’s not the government, then it is the university administrators, and if not them, then it’s the dominant industry players demanding creative work as gifts to their corporate enterprise. The creative investigators show up in this account as the bowl of petunias, going “Oh, no, not again!”