In my last article, I argued that “the better way is no way.” Sounds sort of zen-like, no? That is, universities would do a better job of technology transfer if they started by getting out of the claim-everything-own-everything-patent-everything-try-to-license-exclusively-or-not-at-all-for-one-big-hit-in-2000-inventions business. Or, another way, people did a better job transferring technology before universities got in the way to “manage” things through policy and ownership, seeking money. There are roles for universities in technology transfer, but grasping and owning and holding stuff behind paywalls defaulting to exclusive licenses that rarely happen just isn’t one of them.
The challenge put to me by one vice chancellor for research was to come up with a better system of university management–that is, a better way of working the problem created by the university blunderingly demanding to own everything. You know–if lots of alcohol isn’t good for me, find me something better to drink that has the same effects. Won’t accept just not drinking something intoxicating.
As for these other university roles, consider:
“rainmaker”–connecting people with ideas with people with expertise in working those ideas, creating opportunities for others to succeed. Create work environments that attract talent and give talented people opportunities to meet the people they ought to know to develop their ideas.
“financial supporter”–a major university tech transfer office can spend a million dollars a year on patenting and more on salary and staff to deal with all that patent work. How might a university better spend a few million dollars a year on supporting the movement of research ideas to useful applications?
“curator”–gather rights from multiple contributors (within the university, and outside, including companies) to create commons–libraries, platforms, standards, canonical distributions; there’s an argument that for many new research ideas, the path to public use lies through commons rather than patent monopoly isolated investment.
“technology importer”–gather interesting ideas from other places for locals to work on and exploit–if the university’s region has a problem with, say, an invasive species, then rather than trying to study the problem only, why not import methods that might work and develop them? Faster, less expensive, does not rely on the overhead of systematic sponsored research.
“augmenting relationships for discovery”–research is not the sole source of new ideas with public relevance, so expand instruction and field work to include non-students, companies, public forums, and the like. Get over the fixation on organized research and also support other forms of meeting interesting people doing interesting things. A major research university spends about 20% more on research than it receives to support research–most of the over-spend is for administration. That’s like a few hundred million dollars a year at a typical really big university research operation. How might a hundred million dollars a year be better spent?
Then there are the forgotten legacy approaches that were pretty keen in their day. A few:
Cottrell–Research Corporation–foundation set up by act of Congress to evaluate voluntarily submitted faculty inventions, with an industry board, so that the transfer to industry happens at invention acceptance and the issue then is how an industry internally allocates rights to serve its overall needs; income from industry licensing to industry goes to support more research activities nationwide (originally via the Smithsonian Institution). Broken and stupidified into the university research foundation model because university folk couldn’t bear to let others benefit from “their” inventions.
Bush–OSRD–bring together scientists, industry engineers, and rapid prototypers to create time-sensitive, highly competitive stuff that big corporations and government agencies would not consider funding themselves because they are on different pathways and don’t want to abandon what they have set themselves to. You know, make atomic bombs where the military thinks about improving the production of conventional bombs. Broken and stupidified because it appeared to play geographic favorites and work with the best of the best, later conflated with Endless Frontier, which was to be the basic new science driver, which itself was broken with federal agencies chasing the same dollars.
Pederson–SPICE–recruit and inspire talent to create open technology in a canonical distribution, make available at no charge or for such a nominal fee that no company sees the point in not paying, create a de facto standard platform from which many can operate, creating value in network externalities. Not so much broken as ignored; the Reimers–Cohon-Boyer gene splicing distribution variant was broken in favor of exclusive licensing to run up the income because people would pay additional for the value of excluding others in addition to the value derived from the use of the invention.
Kreeger/Kennedy–government patents–own inventions, acquire patents to recognize inventors and to raise public visibility, not to enforce exclusionary rights or to demand payment, create a domestic commons, and to encourage adoption use methods other than threatening to sue and creating proxy private patent monopolies. Destroyed in the perversity of Bayh-Dole.
But, hey, if you are addicted to drinking yourself silly, why seriously consider not drinking?