Let’s be blunt. The compulsory, comprehensive, portfolio approach to university invention management is a disaster.
- It has a rate of 0.1% to 0.5% producing new products.
- It is 100x less effective than the approach it displaced.
- When you try to use it to make money, you lose friends.
- When you ever do make money using it, you lose friends.
- You lose money unless you are lucky once a decade.
- And most of you are unlucky: you are wasting your money.
- It prevents research from reaching the commons.
- It creates bitterness wherever it goes.
- It is based on compliance, not confidence.
- It has destroyed the private network of invention support.
- It has displaced assistance with procurement.
- It is expensive, complicated, next to useless.
- It co-opts rather than encourages innovation.
- It is built on a pack of lies.
Skip the unsupportable spin and happy talk and selective metrics and bullshit about Bayh-Dole and how innovation has to happen through commercialization–meaning lots of failed profit-seeking from patent positions. 1 product in 1,000 inventions, if you are lucky. Your lucky product has to sell north of $3b just for you to break even on your cumulative office costs. Fat chance. Isn’t it time you pull out of this abusive relationship? Don’t you hate coming into work each day, knowing that you live with a drunken patent practice that is destroying your life? You don’t have to be trapped on Grey Street. It’s time to change. You have to do it.
- talk to the faculty senate
- end compulsory ownership
- introduce public covenants tied to projects
- look to equities, not ownership
- let people pay you because they want to
‘Nuff said. It’s easy once you have the courage to act. Say so long to your crappy policy. And on the other side, there is a great sense of accomplishment, relief, restoration, focus. Oh, yeah, and the now funny, bombastic fuss of all the second-rate speculators you chased off. Good on you. Choose to do something for your people rather than be someone who climbs up through the organization. Do it. Stop living a dream believing things that just ain’t true.