Category Archives: Bozonet

A Koan

The innovateur was compelled to visit first the City of Clowns.  The clowns took the innovation from the innovateur. The clowns were not funny, and they were not helpful, and they were not innovative.  The innovateur watched smoke rise from … Continue reading

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Bozonet Theory Review

Let’s review some basic bozonet theory. Transmission Congestion produces imitative practice When an organization, profession, or activity takes in rapidly a number of new practitioners without a formal course of training, and requires expertise of these practitioners, and these new … Continue reading

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Collectivist and individualist innovation

I have been reading Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. It’s a series of essays critiquing the economics of a planned society, arguing instead in favor of markets and individual choices. Hayek argues that the ideals that give rise to … Continue reading

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You can't manage what you are clueless in measuring

From time to time in technology transfer I hear the quip “you can’t manage what you can’t/don’t measure.” The general drift of the quip is that something has to be counted or measured to determine whether a university IP program … Continue reading

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Partial Patterns

We are attracted to patterns.  A pattern appeals to our sense of order and gives us the impressing that things are following a law, can be predicted, everything in a system.   It’s all nice. Innovation, however, may suggestion a change … Continue reading

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The Bozonet as a Green Cat

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time, Without that monument of cat, –Wallace Stevens, A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts I have been playing around with Pearltrees, which is a way of representing bookmarks graphically [ha, not … Continue reading

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Serving Up Raccoon

So the NAS apparently doesn’t really care about technology transfer and writes a perfunctory report to that effect.   One might think after reading, say Science the Endless Frontier, that the whole point of public funding for research is in the … Continue reading

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Having Feck

“Feckless folk are aye fain o’ ane anither.” We see in this Scots proverb a classic condition of the bozonet. It’s a human condition, and I don’t begrudge the feckless their friends. But it does mean that majority rule in … Continue reading

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Bad Advice for Bureaucrats

There is advice out and around that the lesson of Stanford v. Roche is to always use “hereby assigns” rather than “agrees to assign” in employment contracts dealing with patent rights. For universities, it’s not good advice. First, it misses … Continue reading

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Scary Flying Clowns

The university IP administrators are arguing that faculty should have no voice in the inventions they make in their research work. They want federal policy to make universities into corporate-style contract research operations, creating IP for the benefit of the … Continue reading

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