Release the Bugaboos!

Posted on August 1, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Let’s put some context around the idea of “free agency.”  AUTM clearly hates it, and so do Scott Shane and Joe Allan.  But what is it, exactly, that they hate?  I cannot get into their minds–and of course, it’s clear that AUTM doesn’t have one–but perhaps by outlining a variety of approaches to freedom to innovate, folks can get a better idea.  My hypothesis is that AUTM and co hate a worst case scenario of their own practice, which they then attribute to others and use that as a basis for disparaging those others with the aim of suppressing the discussion about innovation in innovation management.  In short, they hate a bugaboo.  That’s natural.  Bugaboos are the kind of thing one would expect to get hate attention.   It’s just a question whether faculty choice of invention management agents is also a bugaboo of this sort, or perhaps it is a nice bugaboo that ought to be embraced as part of the distinctive innovation environment that university faculty bring to national research and discovery.

Consider a baseline unperturbed by university claims.  Continue reading →

Posted in Freedom, Innovation, Technology Transfer | Comments Off on Release the Bugaboos!

Adoption before productization

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

In Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steven Blank argues that technology startups need to find their “earlyvangelist” customers before their product is finished.  Earlyvangelists are people who have a problem, know they have the problem, and have taken steps to address the problem.  When they see what the startup is doing, they don’t need to be persuaded–they want access.

Amar Bhidé in The Venturesome Economy (excerpted in Steven Johnson’s Innovator’s Cookbook):

According to many of our interviewees [venture-backed businesses], many things learned from interactions with customers were incorporated into their products rather than their core idea (or patent), and this was the most valuable source of their intellectual property.

Bhidé concludes:

Therefore, contrary to the high-level research-centric view, the willingness and ability of users to undertake a venturesome part plays a critical role in determining the ultimate value of innovations.

In this line of reasoning one can see how a monopoly licensing regime for new technology ideas may greatly increase the cost to develop a product by suppressing early adoption and use–even to the point of making the product that could be impossible. Continue reading →

Posted in Commons, Technology Transfer | Comments Off on Adoption before productization

I know, build a compulsory control scheme!

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

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 mean, exactly, when they say that a comprehensive, compulsory, monopoly agent model “works” for university technology transfer?

Posted in Policy, Social Science, Technology Transfer | Comments Off on I know, build a compulsory control scheme!

Innovating in the infrastructure

Posted on July 16, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Here is an interesting take on innovation.  Bill Frezza argues that the STEM infrastructure is not itself practicing uniformly the best STEM.  For biotech, Frezza argues there’s still room for innovation by upgrading to the tech that’s current in other areas of tech, like semiconductors, or at least using approaches that have been used in these areas.

Rather than trying to take “new ideas” and stuff them through an aging infrastructure that’s gone stagnant (“technology transfer”), how about creating the conditions for new infrastructure?   The “problem” is not a dearth of new ideas, and certainly not making an infrastructure “more efficient”, such as (in the case of university IP) present assignments and no-negotiation exclusive licenses.   The problem is how to build new infrastructure around emerging opportunities, advantages, and insights–often recognized and acted upon by infrastructure outsiders.  These folks are *not* trying to “solve the problems” of the existing infrastructure, but rather they assemble the tools and practices they need to do what they recognize as possible.   Their job is not mitigation engineering.  As Neal Stephenson has quipped, the cream of our technology education does not need to find its employment in writing spam filters.  Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, Technology Transfer | Comments Off on Innovating in the infrastructure

Voice + Choice

Posted on July 5, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

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 v Roche showed that it was not federal policy to vest ownership of federally supported inventions with the organizations that happen to host such research.

From a variety of angles, we argue that investigator choice + voice leads to enhanced standing for universities, better efficiencies for transfers of all kinds, and better outcomes for innovation–and for universities, their inventors, and industry.  Choice + voice was the dominant practice for many decades, prior to Bayh-Dole.  Bayh-Dole and its standard patent rights clauses are drafted to anticipate choice + voice, leaving it to universities and their faculty to decide on disposition of ownership and choice of agents.  Such an approach rewarded selectivity, personal initiative, and specialization of agents for industry, operating model, and local conditions.  The approach was wildly successful compared to institutional accumulation as practiced by federal agencies.  No wonder Bayh-Dole was a great idea, seeking to tap into a diverse university-based choice + voice practice.

Now that is all up in the air.  Continue reading →

Posted in Bayh-Dole, Policy, Technology Transfer | Comments Off on Voice + Choice

The Plutonomy

Posted on June 24, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

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 something like “Democrat”):

5. Mutual aid solutions to destructive and inefficient markets for core goods will not return in the United States. Innovation is a form of mutual aid, but the version controlled by the US business system will not recover soon.  Having missed creating the “green collar economy” that would have addressed environmental and employment problems at the same time (and wrecked the Right-Radical / Conservative duopoly in US politics), mainstream innovation theory now consists of pep talks about the American Spirit, tributes to Anglo-Saxon law, and the blanketing of every field of invention with patent filings and unending lawsuits.  The innovation economy systematically seeks and achieves monopoly or duopoly in every domain (Google-Yahoo, Apple-PC), suggesting low survival rates for invention that does not support plutonomy.

One has to be clear these days, what form of innovation does one serve?  Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, Policy | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on The Plutonomy

A case for freedom

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Let’s talk about “free agency”.   Institutions hate it, players love it.  Fans, they are not sure.  When it comes to university innovation, however, we need to work through a number of issues.  Let’s start with a few considerations.

Universities have made their way when it comes to instruction on the strength of faculty independence from institutions, whether political, religious, or financial.  As a result, universities as social institutions have been remarkably adaptable and have provided a counterpoint for consensus thinking.  The question we might ask is whether it is time to change that, and make faculty subordinate to the institution of the university.  I don’t think we should.  That is a premise of what follows.

University faculty have been a source of innovation through research and other creative activities.  They have done this without being told to do this, without being organized and directed by administrators, and have shown themselves capable of arranging their affairs to work things out with each other and to keep commercial activity out of the university.  Faculty have also innovated in innovation management, creating much of the technology transfer approach that we see (sometimes in ruins) today, including the use of the patent system, research foundations as agents for engaging industry, and giving back a share of any licensing revenue to scholarly work and to their institutions.  They have done all this without being forced to do it.  Continue reading →

Posted in Innovation, Policy, Technology Transfer | Comments Off on A case for freedom

The Most Wonderful Thing in the World

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Here is a collection of clips from ten US research university IP policies.  The focus is on claims of ownership, not considering any of a number of other matters, such as royalty sharing schedules or the conditions on  which property is restored to its inventors/authors/developers/possessors.  I’ve added some bold.  Commentary follows for each, in blue.

University of Delaware
http://www.udel.edu/ExecVP/policies/research/6-06.html

It is policy of the University that all inventions and discoveries, together with any tangible research materials, know-how and the scientific data and other records of research including any related government protections (collectively “Intellectual Property”), which are conceived or reduced to practice or developed by University faculty, staff, or students in the course of employment at the University, or result from work directly related to professional or employment responsibilities at the University, or from work carried out on University time, or at University expense, or with the substantial use of University resources, shall be the property of the University. An invention shall constitute any discovery, machine, new and useful process, article of manufacture, composition of matter, life form, design, algorithm, software program, or concept that may have commercial value. University faculty, staff, or students employed by the University who discover or invent or develop a device, product, plant variety, method, or work while associated with the University must cooperate with the University in defining and establishing the rights to such inventions, works, materials, and data. This obligation extends to any Intellectual Property, whether or not made on University time with or without use of University facilities.

Here we have an expansive definition of Intellectual Property that includes know how, data, and records of research; and an expansive claim based on employment–includes work “directly related”, distinguishes “professional responsibilities” from “employment responsibilities” and claims both!  What might work carried out “on University time” mean, if not within course of employment?   Continue reading →

Posted in Policy, Present Assignment | 1 Comment

The Gulag of Inventions

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

A Chronicle of Higher Education story has this headline: “Ambitious AAUP Effort to Guide Relations Between Academics and Industry Meets Resistance.”

The “resistance” is from two officials speaking for AUTM and AAU. These are the same folks who led the failed assault to turn Bayh-Dole into a vesting statute, and were turned away by the US Supreme Court in Stanford v Roche. But they keep at it, repeating arguments about the precious Gulag of Faculty Inventions that they have created, and how it would be a shame for anyone to call them on it.

AUTM has led the effort to misrepresent Bayh-Dole as a vesting statute, giving university administrations the right to take ownership of faculty inventions, put those inventions behind a patent paywall, and attempt a trade in patent monopolies. They pretty this up by saying that all they are doing is dedicated to serving the public interest. Sweet. But the reality is that administrative sincerity has nothing much to do with what happens in practice: inventions go to university ownership to die. What escapes does so despite the wonderful intentions expressed by AUTM and university administrations.

What AUTM won’t tell us is how many unlicensed inventions its universities hold, won’t report the total expenses for technology licensing operations, won’t break out the numbers for federally supported inventions, won’t report on how many patents have been licensed to moribund companies or to companies that otherwise have not supported the creation of commercial product (if commercial products are the goal of “commercialization”). No, information is not forthcoming from the Gulag.  Conclude what you will.

I wonder if the AUTM and AAU officials have bothered asking their membership for input before making their pronouncements.  Continue reading →

Posted in Bayh-Dole, Metrics, Policy | Comments Off on The Gulag of Inventions

WYSIATI

Posted on June 16, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman develops the idea of “what you see is all there is.” He makes the case that we use two rather different mental approaches, which he calls System 1 and System 2. System 1 is active, impulsive, reflexive, and readily jumps to conclusions. System 2 is “lazy,” rule-based, suspicious, analytical. The differences between these approaches to thinking can be seen in things like face recognition–system 1 cannot help but see the face of your friend and know who it is–and in math problems–

2 x 2 =

is a system 1 problem–the answer jumps out–while

17 x 33 =

is a system 2 problem. System 1 sees the pattern–it is a multiplication problem!–but has no idea of the answer. Your System 2 knows how to work the problem, but isn’t about to do so unless it has to–which it doesn’t for the purpose of reading this article, so it won’t. Right?

System 1 and System 2 are interrelated. System 1 matches patterns, so when it perceives something that matches, it will enlist System 2 to construct a narrative that supports its match or conclusion or sensibility. In discussing System 1, Kahneman writes (my emphasis):

An essential design feature of the associative machine is that it represents only activated ideas.  Information that is not retrieved (even unconsciously) from memory might as well not exist.  System 1 excels at constructing the best possible story that incorporates ideas currently activated, but it does not (cannot) allow for information it does not have.  The measure of success for System 1 is the coherence of the story it manages to create.  The amount and quality of the data on which the story is based are largely irrelevant.  When information is scarce, which is a common occurrence, System 1 operates as a machine for jumping to conclusions. (85)

The combination of a coherence-seeking System 1 with a lazy System 2 implies that System 2 will endorse many intuitive beliefs, which closely resemble the impressions generated by System 1.

Jumping to conclusions on the basis of limited evidence is so important to an understanding of intuitive thinking, and comes up so often in this book, that I will use a cumbersome abbreviation for it:  WYSIATI, which stands for what you see is all there is.  System 1 is radically insensitive to both the quality and the quantity of information that gives rise to impressions and intuitions. (86)

Later in the book, Kahneman introduces the idea of rhetorical frames in which a decision is based. When people are asked to make decisions, psychologists have found that they reason from the frame using their System 1 apparatus.   Continue reading →

Posted in Metrics, Social Science, Technology Transfer | Tagged , , | Comments Off on WYSIATI