Category Archives: Metrics

University "Commercialization" and "Commercialization Programs"

I argue that while new products on the market is a primary measure of commercialization, the critical metric for a university commercialization program is the number of unlicensed inventions that the university has claimed.   Every unlicensed invention acts to suppress … Continue reading

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Complex IP Management: Real and Imaginary

I want to look at a transition point in the framing of IP management. This discussion is about how management has structure. I argue that IP management is complex, and just like complex numbers, it has a real component, in … 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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Four Ways of Innovation

Innovation isn’t a simple topic.  As Benoît Godin has shown, for much of its existence “innovation” was a negative thing.  You didn’t want to be called an innovator, and that’s what you called folks who were loons and threats.  In … Continue reading

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The urge to tech transfer

Technology transfer refers to the movement of capability from one group to another.  Three conventional forms are from a developed country to a developing country (send in the tractors, there have to be tractors); from one industry to another (wifi … Continue reading

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Opening up subject invention reporting

In the last post, I suggested a new reporting for subject inventions.  Nothing like this presently exists.  The ubiquitous university licensing survey aggregates information and therefore becomes useless for tracking subject inventions.  And misleading. 

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Improving periodic reporting

Bayh-Dole is not a perfect law by any means.  But what are the weak points?  Where can things be improved?  Here is one suggestion.  In 35 USC 202(c)(5) funding agreements are required to have language to permit agencies to request … Continue reading

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Limitation and Focus

It is easy to confuse focus and limitation. Focus selects valuable things from diversity, mobilizes resources, and aims to achieve a goal. Limitation cuts off consideration of opportunity from diversity and sets up rules to make things simple (or at … Continue reading

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Metrics of "technology untransfer"

Stuff arising in research is hardly technology.  Research deals in glimmers and epiphanies, arguable discovery and hypothesis, data and more data, theory formation and creative destruction of theory.   In all this, research inventions are not, generally, technology, and transfer does … Continue reading

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