Here are the seven fitts of the university president’s speech, in order.
- A very exciting day for the university
- Who hoards technology in the Ivory Tower?
- Technemort, the name never to be spoken
- Who ya gonna call?
- Students, creating the value-added for investors
- If we build it you will pay
- We are delighted to help Stanford become a better university [laughter]
- Remarkable leadership
The talk itself was posted at Geekwire. My transcript retains various pause words, as these affect the meaning, which includes tone, hesitation, and searching for the right words or syntax, in addition to content abstracted for its paraphrasable elements.
Why are these speeches always about changing STEM faculty culture to something it already largely is–creative, curious, engaged, dedicated, opportunistic, public-spirited? Why is there such antagonism to faculty taking personal responsibility for their discoveries and developments? Why such an institutional willingness to subsidize venture investment but not faculty, staff, and students? Why such an institutional attraction to monopoly deals? And why doesn’t an incredible failure rate over the past three decades of trying change the institutional rhetoric? We can’t seem to get enough of this stuff, like a reality-TV addiction.
Here are some alternative bits of senior leadership rhetoric to consider.
“The university administration has decided to end compulsory participation in its university-run IP management program. We will continue to offer assistance to those who request it, but we will not force anyone to use our resources. Faculty are not required to publish all their works through the university press. Likewise, they need not disseminate all their ideas through the university’s licensing program. We therefore are running up a flag today, one that tells the world that we will be a resource, not a bottleneck.”
“After review of the Supreme Court’s decision in Stanford v Roche, we are compelled to change our patent policy. We acknowledge that mere employment is not a basis on which to claim ownership of inventions. Similarly, we provide resources to faculty to do their work, including instruction, research, and public service, as a commitment we make to them along with an offer of employment. Thus, the normal use of resources made available to faculty is also not a valid basis for claiming ownership of inventions. We will claim ownership of inventions only when to do so honors voluntary commitments that faculty have previously entered into with us or with others.”
“The foundation of innovation from research is freedom at the periphery of an organization to engage others in new ideas, practices, and technology. How that engagement takes place is critical, and the possibilities are difficult to predict in advance. While establishing formal processes to control engagement may sound attractive, in practice making creative people conform to administrative processes, or making such conformance a test of administrative authority, is stifling. We therefore are going to adopt a new strategy–of deliberately not having a strategy in advance for discoveries, inventions, software, and other creative assets. If someone has an idea, and wants assistance from the university, we have people willing and able to help. But we won’t be telling anyone ‘how to do it’ because, frankly, we don’t know and probably no one does until something unfolds.”
“We dearly love our friends in the investment community. We understand the burden of using wealth to make yet more wealth, and the pressures that come with a singular focus on making money from money. We’ve read at least a summary of Piketty’s book and get this much–that right now it is easier to make money speculating with money than it is to make money by producing goods and providing services. Of course, then, the smart money is on lots of money to make more money and not on running a business for the sake of service, or customers, or the public. But a university is not about the money, though we understand (really, we do) the importance of money. A university is about service–both to the past, to preserve it warts and all, and to the present, to use what we know and can find out to help people doing stuff. While making money from money is also doing stuff, it’s only a small part of the big wide world, and we cannot afford to subsidize your investment efforts with our institutional resources. We love you, investment folks, and we hope to produce opportunities for you, too. If you like our work, donate. You do have the bucks. We will focus on public service and leave the effort of putting money at risk to make more money to you.”
“Innovation comes about through the most marvelous and unanticipated events. Our effort is to be open to such black swans, and able to take advantage of the unexpected. Yes, we did make it through Antifragile! Rather than building increasingly large, complex monocultures of policy optimized for a single vision of the future–a vision that may indeed happen, but so may twenty thousand others–we will build services that are able to respond to most anything. Rather than process operated by technicians, we will rely on fallible, changing, personal experience and judgment. If that sounds dangerous to an organization, it is, but not nearly so dangerous as an organization abandoning its social role in favor of a nearly random demand for order. There are many agents available to help with new ideas. Our people can be agents as well. For now, however, we dedicate the opportunities that our creative people make to the society in which they make them. Our role is to take care of the creative environment, so people who honor their commitment to public service have the resources they need, wherever they may find them, to pursue creative work.”
“In the past, when we have received royalties from patent licensing, we have used money after costs to create research funds and build research buildings. We have not done much for instruction, nor for those who support a creative environment where we produce many things but only a handful are ever acknowledged with payments under a licensing agreement. Therefore, today, we are announcing a new program, by which anyone inventing or producing new things for which others in industry or the investment community offer to pay may designate instruction or the creative environment as beneficiaries of any net royalties after costs. Under this program, up to 100% of net royalties may go (1) to support student scholarships and faculty and student initiatives to further a creative instructional environment or (2) to support non-profits and individuals involved in advancing the interests of the community, and especially those organizations helping patients and families whose well being is often the ultimate goal of our biomedical research investigators.”
“The thirty year experiment built around the Bayh-Dole Act has reached a dead end. Regrettably, we have unwittingly built out the very system of absolute institutional control that we (wrongly, now it appears) railed at the federal government for practicing. We thought we could do things better, and in some ways we did, but overall, we became more compulsory with our faculty and students and more shrill with people in industry. In short, we have been bad neighbors when we were trying to improve our lot in the neighborhood. But there is an upside. We have learned that even under the most strictly controlled administrative conditions, creative people will do what they damn well please. We have decided, therefore, with the concurrence of the faculty senate, to return our intellectual property and research policies to their condition circa 1970. From there, we will observe and support the many pathways by which our creative community engages those that find our work of value. Whether that value is imaginative, inspirational, competitive, or financial is of less concern than that our people have a public stage from which to work, if they so choose. We have spent three decades backing our way into demanding administrative control of all new things in the hopes of making a profit from licensing from one in a thousand. Surely we can do better if we move purposefully forward to embrace the freedom to innovate.”
“We have cancelled our intellectual property policy and disbanded our technology transfer office. The default provisions of federal patent and copyright law are sufficient guides to our administration of IP. We will repeat that faculty are not working for hire in performing their instructional and research duties that arise under their appointments, nor are they inventing on behalf of the university, or under its direction, or for its benefit–unless they choose to do so. There will be some uncertainty, but we are confident that we can remain in compliance with federal research requirements, as all of the stipulations under the Bayh-Dole Act are self-implementing in the standard patent rights clause. Our technology transfer staff have been given the opportunity to join a new non-profit invention management organization, and we have entered into a non-exclusive arrangement with that organization to provide services to members of the university community upon request. We anticipate entering into a number of additional such arrangements. University-hosted inventors, software developers, and research investigators will now have the same freedoms that have been enjoyed by our artists, writers, and instructors. This new arrangement gets university administration out of worrying about investors, patent infringement, and blocking industry collaborations with our faculty and students. If there are concerns, that is why we have department chairs and deans, and why we have university rules on tenure and conflict of interest. We say, respect the environment that the university provides, and make something of your work any way you are able. Now, let’s back to work and see how things go.”