Intersections and Progress

Posted on November 28, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

It’s Thanksgiving in the United States–time for harvest, family, and giving thanks.  Here at Research Enterprise we can be grumpy and snarky at times, and often there’s good reason for it.  But the idea of progress, of learning from the past and realizing new things in the present–that’s powerful stuff.  So is developing tools to help us realize those new things.  Steve Jobs talked about Apple being at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts.   The liberal arts are lost capabilities in STEM discussions, which seem to hold that if only there were more folks capable of making technical things, then society would be a lot better off, without considering how we imagine our futures.  Apparently, the idea goes, we will imagine our futures through new technology, and select from the new technology especially those things that investors can work a profit from, and from those, favor the things for which there is a huge potential market, or already is a huge market.

I would like to think that there are ways of imagining our future directions that do not depend on STEM, that do not depend for that matter on technology or new tools to displace old tools.  Not that I don’t like tools–they are wonderful stuff–but that I also find the future something much more robust than simply tools to fill up all our space for working, playing, and thinking about stuff.  We tend to become what we occupy ourselves with, and recognizing that, sometimes it’s good, when at an intersection of technology and the liberal arts to choose the liberal arts direction for a change, and travel that road, and consider what it is we ought to do, what we might aspire to do that’s worth doing, before our wave breaks up in the sand on that long shore of events.

What does it look like, this road of the liberal arts?  Historically, there were seven of them–the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy.  Or, as S. K. Heninger points out in Touches of Sweet Harmony, number at rest, number in space, number in time, and number in motion.  One might consider Lorenzo’s speech in The Merchant of Venice: Continue reading →

Posted in Literature | Comments Off on Intersections and Progress

Another misstatement of Bayh-Dole that could use an update

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

Here is another misstatement of Bayh-Dole in the wild, in a history of the Stanford OTL:

Another significant event took place in 1980, when the U.S. Congress passed Public Law 96-517, the Bayh-Dole Act, which provided that rights to inventions resulting from government-sponsored research at universities would be automatically allocated to the universities. Previously, it had been necessary to petition each sponsoring agency, and while many such petitions were granted, there often were considerable delays that extended beyond patent filing deadlines, preventing many invention disclosures from being licensed.

I suppose if folks at Stanford really believed this sort of thing (credo, quia absurdum est), then they would be motivated to take it all the way to the Supreme Court, which it turns out they did.  The Supreme Court made clear that Bayh-Dole did not vest invention ownership with universities:  rights were not “automatically allocated to the universities.”   Perhaps someone at Stanford ought to make an annotation that this part of the history of Stanford might be better phrased:  “…which university licensing offices such as the Stanford OTL believed (wrongly as it turned out) that rights to inventions . . .would be automatically allocated to the universities.”  That would be accurate.  But it would take some real courage to make the revision.

Posted in Bayh-Dole | Comments Off on Another misstatement of Bayh-Dole that could use an update

Environments for Entrepreneurs (and the models that don’t help them)

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

The first part of this series commented on the primary findings of Walter Valdivia’s new Brookings Institution report calling for universities to look at startups as a way to “transfer technology.”  I appreciate Valdivia’s work.  It’s good to have a discussion about these issues, and the Brookings report offers that chance.  If you want my summary, it’s in a list at the end.  If you want to see how I get there, then read on.

Let’s take the Brookings Report summary sentence by sentence.

University technology transfer has been largely dominated by a business model of licensing university patents to the highest bidder.

The opening premise is true but for the last four words. University administrators have indeed come to think of technology transfer as the licensing patents. This fixation pre-dates Bayh-Dole and as David Mowery and others have made clear, the idea of Bayh-Dole arises from this fixation rather than creating it. Continue reading →

Posted in Technology Transfer | Comments Off on Environments for Entrepreneurs (and the models that don’t help them)

Sparrows, Mockingbirds, and Crows

Posted on November 23, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

Walter Valdivia at the Brookings Institution has a new report out, noted by the New York Times, on how to improve “technology transfer.” Valdivia is one of the more astute commentators on university licensing behaviors, and it’s valuable to consider his point of view. His general point is that, in a survey of university patent licensing programs, a lot of them do not appear to be “profitable.” This may be true, but there is a big disconnect in the move from the title emphasis on “technology transfer” to “profit-making” by a licensing office. Let’s try to get at these issues. In this first part, I will deal with the models. In the second, I will work with statements from the Brookings report and the New York Times article.

“Technology transfer” can mean any number of things. At its most basic, it means something akin to what it sounds like it should mean–the movement of “technology” from one place to another, such as from a developed country to an less developed one, or from an industry in which a technology is mature to one in which the technology is new, or from a lab making a discovery to others wanting to apply and use the discovery. A “technology” is a means of doing something, typically something useful, often involving tools of some sort. But technology is more than just physical items–it may include methods and know how and logistics. To introduce tractor technology to farming in an undeveloped area means more than just landing a tractor in a field–there has to be a supply of fuel, and spare parts, and training for those using the tractor or servicing it, and the fields have to be dry enough to use the tractor, and there has to be something for the tractor to pull, like a plow, and a place for the tractor to be parked so it is out of the weather, and won’t get stolen. And, yes, for somethings, there also must be permissions and licenses to use the technology, assuming that one has patent positions in the target jurisdiction for the proposed new use.

Technology transfer, in short, is about diffusion of use, and often requires a robust infrastructure. The more infrastructure needed, the more difficult the transfer may be.   Continue reading →

Posted in Bayh-Dole, Technology Transfer | 1 Comment

An Open Letter to the New York Times

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

For some reason, the New York Times response form is down.  So I thought I’d post this letter here while I wait for the response form to come back on line.

Mr. Pérez-peña:

On November 21 the New York Times published an article written by you that pertains to university patenting and licensing.  The fourth paragraph of the article contains an error with regard to the Bayh-Dole Act, referred to there as “a 1980 federal law.”  You write:

A 1980 federal law gave universities ownership of patents arising from federally funded research, and the results have generally been seen as a boon to universities.

The Bayh-Dole Act does not give universities ownership of patents.  This was the central issue of the US Supreme Court decision in the case of Stanford v Roche, decided in 2011.  The Supreme Court was clear on this point:

Held: The Bayh-Dole Act does not automatically vest title to federally funded inventions in federal contractors or authorize contractors to unilaterally take title to such inventions.

The Court elaborated its lack of regard for Stanford’s claim that the Bayh-Dole Act gave ownership of inventions made with federal support to universities that hosted the research: Continue reading →

Posted in Bayh-Dole | Comments Off on An Open Letter to the New York Times

A Redtail’s Dream for University IP Management

Posted on November 16, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

 

[Update 10/21/2018: Sundberg raised $124,000 on Indiegogo to print book one of her webcomic Stand Still. Stay Silent. She then raised $250,000 on Kickstarter to print book two. The webcomic is available “for free” on the web. Sundberg has an on-line store, is working on a game, and lets people log in to watch her draw pages for SSSS as the story line develops. Open, community-supported. What a concept.]

[Update 9/17/2020: Minna just completed another Kickstarter campaign for printing her third book in the series Stand Still, Stay Silent. Every page of the series has been published first on-line, free. Her goal was $35,000. She raised $315,000 from 4,000 backers in 30 days. Not only does she have funding to keep drawing but also she keeps her freedom. Nice.]

In 2011, Minna Sundberg, an art and design student at the University of Art and Design (now Aalto University) in Helsinki, decided to create a web comic for “practice.” She started drawing a Redtail’s Dream (aRTD), a story pulling in bits of Finnish mythology about an irresponsible puppy spirit-fox that has trouble with the aurora (“fox-fire”) and sends an entire village into limbo-land, but for Hannu, a rather lazy young man and Ville, his faithful dog, who happen to be off in the woods rather than helping out with preparations for a festival. The spirit-fox, to avoid getting into trouble with the elder spirits, recruits Hannu and Ville to rescue the villagers from various dream world situations where they are stuck doing menial tasks they cannot find a way to complete so they can return to the world of the living. In each situation, Ville the dog finds himself shape-shifted into a different animal, but with dog ears and tail.

As Minna posted new pages, at a rate of six a week, in both Finnish and English, she developed a reading audience.   Continue reading →

Posted in Commons, Freedom, Innovation, Projects, Technology Transfer | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on A Redtail’s Dream for University IP Management

Simple Bayh-Dole

Posted on November 15, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

Introduction

The Bayh-Dole Act is a complex piece of work, with a tangle of requirements and implementing regulations, with plenty of opportunity for misunderstandings and exploitation.  In other places, I have worked to show in detail how the Bayh-Dole Act operates, citing the Act chapter and verse, as it were.  To make it simple, one has to drop the citations, the qualifications, and the explanations, and reduce things to basic points.  If you know the details of Bayh-Dole, then you will see the limitations of the account I provide here.  If you don’t know Bayh-Dole, then be assured that each point here drives at something that is well supported in the Act, its implementing regulations, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Stanford v. Roche.

You may have read versions of Bayh-Dole that differ from the account here. There has been a massive misinformation campaign, led by university patent administrators of the course of nearly thirty years. Any web search will turn of pages of sloppy, self-serving, and even fabricated statements about Bayh-Dole. Much of the academic literature has been taken in, or accepted the university administrators’ arguments for convenience.  A few authors stand out–Rebecca Eisenberg, David Mowrey, Bhaven Sampat, Robert Cook-Deegan, and Arti Rai among them.   Continue reading →

Posted in Bayh-Dole, Metrics, Technology Transfer | Comments Off on Simple Bayh-Dole

Silicon Valley Chapter LES Software Conference

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

Next Wednesday, Nov 13, UC Berkeley and the Silicon Valley Chapter of LES are hosting a one-day conference on “software and copyright IP commercialization.”  If you are in the Bay Area, or need an excuse to get to the Bay Area, this should be interesting.  The logistics are at the LES website, here.  The first panel of the day, I expect, seems prepared to present licensing software in the context of licensing patents.

I remember the day I was out at MIT to give an all-day workshop on dealing with software IP for the OTL.  I mean, MIT.  Home of the GPL, and I was out there doing my best to argue that there was another model that didn’t start with Bayh-Dole or patents.  Problem was, that was the day Akamai went public, and at noon everyone was at their workstations watching the MIT equity fortune accumulate.   Continue reading →

Posted in IP, Projects, Technology Transfer | Comments Off on Silicon Valley Chapter LES Software Conference

Freedman's Science & Technology Strategy Conundrums

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

Benoît Godin suggested that I take a look at Ron Freedman’s “10 S&T Strategy Conundrums.” I think it’s a document that a lot of folks should read.  While Freedman is focused on the situation in Canada, there’s a lot for the rest of the world to consider.  In particular, American states ought to be asking themselves some tough questions in light of these “conundrums.”

I’m particularly taken with Freedman’s development of the “mid-sized company” problem (Conundrum #4):

While we have some rudimentary data about the overall population of medium-sized firms as a whole, unbelievably, nobody has crunched the numbers for mid-sized S&T firms. We don’t know a single thing about the pool of tomorrow’s tech stars: how many of them there are, in which industry sectors, which parts of the country, how many people they employ, what their R&D spending is, etc., etc.

So, an additional conundrum is that we have been fashioning S&T strategies without knowing anything about the critical population of medium-sized firms and their special needs for government support. What is your solution to this conundrum?

If all those university “start-ups” are supposed to become something big, then where are the mid-sized firms that were university start-ups five years ago?  Why do the universities only report how many are “still in business” and then lump them all in with, say, Google, and expect us to believe that the approach “works.”  How do we know that Google wasn’t just special, a kind of luck, rather than the implication that it is just one more “output”of an administrative process that is rigging for volume but not reporting the structure of its activity or results?  Indeed, why do our science and technology policies have next to nothing to say about luck?  What would a state-based technology policy look like, if it were based on improving the luck of creative folks messing around with stuff?

 

Posted in Metrics, Policy, Technology Transfer | Comments Off on Freedman's Science & Technology Strategy Conundrums

Federal Sweep and Swamp Policy

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Gerald Barnett

The US government proposes spending $1b on innovation in manufacturing. If one likes government spending on such things, this sounds like a really good thing. Here is a link to the NNMI homepage overview.  The preliminary design document for the effort is here. In a nutshell, the plan imagines up to 44 institutes each focused on a technology or theme in manufacturing, spread regionally around the country. A first institute is up and going in additive manufacturing, spread across a multi-state region from Ohio to West Virginia dubbed the “Tech Belt.” Another 15 institutes are being prepped for proposals.

Each institute is conceived as a coalition of leading organizations in a focused area of study:

Institutes will be a partnership between government, industry, and academia, supported with cost-share funding from Federal and non-Federal sources. It is expected that institutes will typically receive $70-120 million in total Federal funds, depending upon the magnitude of the opportunity, maturity, and capital intensity of the technology, and scope of the focus area, over a 5-7 year timeframe. When combined with substantial non-Federal co-investment, for example 1:1, it is envisioned the total capitalization of an institute over this period will be $140 to $240 million.

A key feature of the network and its individual IMIs is a strong focus on building clusters of advanced manufacturing capabilities that join expertise from industry, academia, and government . . . .

Each Institute will have a unique and well-defined focus area, such as a manufacturing process, an enabling technology, manufacturing processes for new advanced materials, or an industry sector . . . .

If one is going to have huge scale institutes led by industry, academic, and government leaders, funded at multi-million dollars a year, requiring an additional multi-million dollars of private money, then the NNMI is set up about as well as one could want. It is, so to speak, “best practices.”   Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, Policy, Sponsored Research, Technology Transfer | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Federal Sweep and Swamp Policy