Author Archives: Gerald Barnett

Shanzhai Rules

Over at the LinkedIn Post-Industrial Design group, there’s a little discussion started by Matt Sinclair on a report called The Future of Open Fabrication from the Institute For the Future. The report calls out the Shanzhai approach to manufacturing in … Continue reading

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Feeling Festive and Innovation Optimistic

The year is winding down and it’s holiday time.   Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and festive solstice! Folks will have different perspectives on research enterprise and innovation, and its worth having some frank and firm arguing about it, but the whole … Continue reading

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What SvR Means: Five Key Points

What does Stanford v Roche mean for research enterprise? 1.  Federal university research innovation policy favors freedom over compulsory practices. Bayh-Dole rolled back agency compulsory invention ownership policies to create a powerful group of expert, university-based, independent investigators with access … Continue reading

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Rev Proc 2007-47’s Nonsensical Attack on Bayh-Dole

[9/20/18–See this discussion of Rev Proc 2007-47 by the University Industry Demonstration Project–“Public Policy Regarding Industry-Sponsored Research at U.S. Universities.“] Many public universities use tax-free bonds to construct their research buildings, and when they do, they run afoul of the … Continue reading

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Innovation Fail: autocracy + bureaucracy

I have yet to see a reasoned argument supporting what many university technology transfer officers appear to favor: that the best innovation policy is autocracy + bureaucracy That’s what 70 of ’em argued in their amicus brief in Stanford v. … Continue reading

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The Agreement on Top of the Agreement

Karen White, a veteran of technology transfer and research development, has started a blog on innovation and technology transfer called Almost White Papers.   In a recent post, she makes a great point: Technology transfer does work when the parties to … Continue reading

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Free Agency

It has been a year and half since Arundeep Pradhan published his “defense” of the AUTM status quo in Business Week. If one looks at the comments to that article, one finds a string of pearls of insiders commending the … Continue reading

Posted in History, Metrics, Policy, Technology Transfer | 1 Comment

Rear View Research

I came across an interesting blog post by Jeff Henning. He provides an account of a talk at the University of Georgia by Stan Sthanuathan, VP of marketing strategy for Coca-Cola. Sthanuathan points out that a lot of industry research … Continue reading

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Trying to make the present assignment problem really simple

I’ve been working through the shift to present assignments.  There’s so much bad advice for universities out there.  You’d think the attorneys writing their blog posts and newsletter columns could at least make an effort to get it right.  The … Continue reading

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Putting the Groove Back

University tech transfer folks got Bayh-Dole wrong, repeated it so often that it started to sound right, were told by the Supreme Court they were wrong, and now are trying to implement privately what sounded good to them–compulsory university ownership … Continue reading

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