Last night I dreamed I was engaged in a debate. It was for a call-in radio show. Oddly, we were on one of those huge chartered buses. The bus was filled with university technology licensing managers. Dunno where we were or where we were going. You know, in dream-land. In my dream, I heard myself saying–
Call it what you will–technology transfer, IP management, technology licensing, industry alliances, economic development, innovation–university technology management as you practice it comes down to three simple points:
- Take IP
- License IP
- Make money
This is entirely alien to what makes a university a great source of ideas and innovation.
Presidents, provosts, and deans might take what they say is a “long view” and give a tech management office five years to make money, or they may threaten to fire you all if you haven’t made them wealthy in 18 months. The reality is, money is the measure of the activity–not social benefit, not happy industry interactions, not faculty believing they are being well served.
And even if you tried to do something aligned with university strengths, with public mission [–here, I rattled off a list of names and programs–], there are people who see anything but talk about making lots of money in clever schemes as weakness, as limiting, as foolishly idealistic, as giving up, as incompetence, as an excuse. They will drive you out if you don’t give in to them and at least put on a show of trying to make millions.
It’s so simple, it’s addictive. Every year or so there is a huge deal–a $750m settlement here, a $1.2b buyout of future royalties there, and the pressure to do the same at your school ramps up. It permeates your policies. It changes what you say. It changes your practices. It makes you defensive. It makes you anxious. But you cannot be rid of this simple mantra. They won’t let you.
The dream woke me up. It was 5:45 am. I took the dog downstairs and wrote this up while she crunched her morning kibble. I thought about the implications of the dream. It’s not about logic or law or even actual outcomes, or the mantra of IP, licensing, and money would have failed long ago. I don’t think it’s even about the chartered bus.
The debate is not about reasoning, not about what Bayh-Dole actually says, not about evidence-based practice, not about what companies and investors really want. I wish it were. So what is it that has got into the hearts of university leaders, so that despite the public rhetoric about public benefit and economic vitality arising from university innovation, the expectations, evaluation, and practices of a university IP management program are shaped by this mantra of domination, exploitation, and greed? One would think I’d been dreaming about major college football programs.
I have discussed before the idea of patent licensing has taken the form of prophecy–it is the equivalent of saying that aliens from the planet Clarion will come to save the prepared believers from the coming flood. Except the aliens are speculative investors and the planet is Bayh-Dole and the salvation lies in licensing income, not waiting UFOs, and being prepared means operating a monopoly IP regime that seeks to benefit from speculative monopolies built around IP positions.
Once a prophecy has been taken in as a belief rather than a hypothetical, then Festinger’s five points come into play:
1. A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how it behaves.
2. The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the same of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo.
3. The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
4. Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
5. The individual believer must have social support.
The believers have gotten universities to change their patent policies, to confirm their beliefs about ownership, patents, and a glorious economic future. It is not easy to undo this change, this evidence of commitment.
Disconfirmation does not lead to abandoning the belief: it leads to proselytizing for the belief. The belief strengthens its hold on the believers. The evidence indicates that universities have done a terrible job implementing a licensing regime after Bayh-Dole became law. Their policy statements are garble. They have dismantled what was modestly successful. They have created patent gridlock around some of the most promising developments–nanotech, green tech, 3d printing–and held most of the creative output of university research hostage to licensing programs dedicated to exclusive–monopoly–licensing.
Folks are reduced to scaring up “success stories” and making these accounts appear to be actuals rather than potentials, or in the case of the startup programs at places such as Utah and Washington, simply deceptions, a “culture of deception and untruths” designed to mislead the public, the faculty, and state legislatures. If universities were really all that successful in making money from licensing, tuition would not be going up, and companies could get research done for free. If universities were really all that successful in putting inventions into use, they would publish the status of each subject invention, using the simple parameters Bayh-Dole authorizes federal agencies to request.
Folks trying to save their legacy travel the country, advertising the “success” of Bayh-Dole and extolling the rise of the bureaucratic IP administrative state as a sign that innovation and economic vitality are just around the corner. Proselytizing is a condition of failed prophecy. It takes more than a conversion experience to exit such a condition. It is difficult enough for a natural person to do this–but what about a corporate “person,” such as a university corporation, a golem, a souless, thoughtless mass of administrative clay made to do whatever those having power over it make it do? And what happens when those having administrative power live in a failed prophecy about how university patent licensing will spark the next renaissance in university finances? Does the university eventually wither? Is there a pathway out?