Category Archives: Policy

Recovering Agent Choice

Having looked at the various topics Research Enterprise has covered over the past four years, it’s also good to look at where we are in terms of university innovation management. Prior to Bayh-Dole’s passage in 1980, university innovation practice was … Continue reading

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Summary Re-writing Bayh-Dole

[Updated with new examples to replace ones since removed from the web–whack-a-mole time] I have pointed out how AUTM’s summary of Bayh-Dole puts its own misleading spin on the law.  Here is how this bad advice works in the wild.  … Continue reading

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Bayh-Dole, the Invention Management Free-Agency Law

I came across an email from November 2009 that rather lays out the heart of the public debate around free agency.  It’s from Joe Allen to Robert Hardy (at COGR) and Howard Bremer (long time at WARF).   Robert Hardy has sent … Continue reading

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Competing Primitive Narratives of Technology Transfer

I have noticed recently how merely having a reasonable account for something doesn’t mean that one has got the one and only reasonable account. Todorov, that critical theorist that folks in tech transfer have never heard of, says that there’s … Continue reading

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There are three paths you can go on…

Here’s a discussion in the wild, c. 2008, from some folks who generally have legitimate concerns about Bayh-Dole (my emphasis): One of BD’s intended virtues involved transferring default patent ownership from government to parties with stronger incentives to license inventions. … Continue reading

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Dealing with TLO Food Bowl Aggression

I came across a paper in PLoS that discusses Global Access Licensing.  The point of the paper is to lay out GAL Framework principles and appeal to university licensing offices to implement them.  The authors point out that Bayh-Dole allows … Continue reading

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Freedom to Innovate

When the discussion of “free agency” comes up in technology transfer, it is easy to get diverted into rather narrow formulations.   In previous essays, I’ve pointed out that inventor ownership is the default in US patent law, and it takes … Continue reading

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I know, build a compulsory control scheme!

Teresa M. Amabile, “How to Kill Creativity”: Creativity is undermined unintentionally every day in work environments that were established–for entirely good reasons–to maximize business imperatives such as coordination, productivity, and control. In Steven Johnson’s The Innovator’s Cookbook.  What do folks … Continue reading

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Voice + Choice

Does a national research innovation system benefit from the mass conversion of generally open and diverse environments of university scholarship to institutionalized management behind a paywall?  That’s what is happening in America right now.  Efforts have only intensified after Stanford … Continue reading

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The Plutonomy

Chris Newfield, writing in his occasional blog on the woes of the middle class, discusses innovation in a list of the “core concepts of the current system” in the US (where Right/Radical is somewhat equivalent to “Republican” and Conservative means … Continue reading

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