Breaking a social contract, with startups

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

For those universities that have made it a centerpiece of their practice to start companies as a way to get rich and create jobs, there’s a sobering critique of using the venture capital route to do it in the April issue of Wired.

…The VC model is based on creating wealth for investors, not on building successful businesses.  You buy into a company early on and sell out a few years later; if you pick well, you make lots of money.  But your profits don’t accrue to the company itself, which could implode after your exit for all you care.  Silicon Valley is full of venture capitalists who have become dynastically wealthy off the backs of companies that no longer exist.

The venture model is about turning a profit for investors by buying early and selling as soon after as possible.

Now enter university administrators looking to make money from startups, and looking to create investment funds to for this purpose when private investors won’t bite often enough.   Continue reading →

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Bad Science and University Technology Transfer

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Today we see yet another story on the emerging epidemic of bad science, this one from the former head of Amgen’s global cancer research.    Of 53 “landmark” publications in top journals, Amgen could not replicate 47 of the claimed results.  Many of the papers were from universities.  This is nothing new, following on studies by John Ioannidis, Jonah Lehrer and others that show that many science articles published in top journals are simply wrong.  Other studies indicate that an alarming proportion of university scientists are willing to fabricate or selectively publish data.

In today’s report, scientists point out that the pressure to publish in academia is so great, and the protections on research that would seek to replicate so poorly represented, that one wonders if university science is, generally and simply put, unreliable in its published form.  If so, then peer review is failing, not just in highly politicized areas like climate science, but in core areas of research, such as cancer.

This bodes very badly for the continuing university technology transfer emphasis on biotech. Continue reading →

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Getting it clear on the Stanford v Roche decision

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

While the history of the work to create the Bayh-Dole Act is always fascinating, the intentions and later reasoning about the law by advocates for legislation does not necessarily translate into the intention of Congress, nor to the actual language of the law, nor into the clear sense that the Supreme Court made of the law.  The substantial effort to patent and license by universities–an effort that often and by university policy outstrips the reasonable sense and self-interest of the inventors themselves–is not material to the interpretation of the law.  Well, er, I guess it is if you want the law to be different than it is, or you don’t want to accept that many universities are in breach of Bayh-Dole’s standard patent rights clause and are, by policy and practice, intending to frustrate the purposes of the law, misstate the law and its operation, and mislead faculty and the public as to the reasons why a university takes ownership of federally supported inventions.

With regard to those federally supported inventions, the standard patent rights clause provides that  inventors own their inventions, consistent with federal patent law and federal research grants policy–both Circular A-110 and the Bayh-Dole Act.  This is not a matter of personal opinion but rather is the Supreme Court’s opinion.  That opinion counts, as it shapes the interpretation of the law.  The Court’s reasoning is clear throughout.  Read the decision.  The text is at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-1159.pdf

Here are excerpts, with my boldface, that make the case as clear as day: Continue reading →

Posted in Bayh-Dole, Stanford v Roche, Technology Transfer | 3 Comments

Equity culture vs bonus culture

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Paul Graham has a new essay on the challenges of concepts of property that don’t work.  For instance, ownership of smells, which might work on a moonbase selling air with distinctive scents to people, but strikes us as a foolish use of property here on earth.  Graham compares this with the problems in the music and movie industries, where claims of ownership have been extended to a range of new forms of copying and transmission:

Ultimately it comes down to common sense. When you’re abusing the legal system by trying to use mass lawsuits against randomly chosen people as a form of exemplary punishment, or lobbying for laws that would break the Internet if they passed, that’s ipso facto evidence you’re using a definition of property that doesn’t work.

Universities haven’t quite gotten so far as mass lawsuits, but they are pushing a claim to property that extends beyond mere inventions (which is bad enough) to include know how, expertise, and the like.  These are forms of property that “don’t work” in university research settings.   There is only so far one can go forcing the issue with policy demands. Continue reading →

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"Employerism", ethics, and IP at the University of Washington

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

In 2003, the Public Employment Relations Commission ruled that despite a state law to the contrary, graduate students at the University of Washington should be allowed to organize and seek union representation.  I’m not so concerned with the unionization issue, as I was once a graduate student at UW myself, and there are a number of sides to the matter.   Rather, I want to look at how technology transfer’s approach to IP has transformed the formal, public view of the university–and how that in turn leads other administrators and leaders to adopt this transformed view.

Here is a substantive piece of the decision that allowed union representation:

The Executive Director rejects the employer’s attempt to characterize the union’s arguments as a “source of funds” inquiry inapt to a unit determination issue while itself claiming there is no employment relationship. In this case:

* From a very practical perspective, grant proposals submitted by faculty members (in the name of the employer and with the approval of senior employer officials) fulfill a role in the marketplace that is comparable to advertising by a private enterprise offering services to a client base. Grants don’t just happen. This employer exerts substantial control over the solicitation of research business. Continue reading →

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Systems that tolerate stagnation

Posted on March 25, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Neal Stephenson, in a World Policy Institute essay:

Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop small improvements to existing systems—climbing the hill, as it were, toward a local maximum, trimming fat, eking out the occasional tiny innovation—like city planners painting bicycle lanes on the streets as a gesture toward solving our energy problems. Any strategy that involves crossing a valley—accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance—will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.

Think “present assignments” and “title certainty” and improving the “little linear model” of university technology transfer.

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The loss of university invention selectivity

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

A primary argument for university involvement in the management of federally supported inventions was that university agents were reporting something like 30% of their inventions under management were being placed with commercialization partners, while the federal agencies’ rate was something like 2%.

What is not so generally discussed is why the university agent rate was so much better.  At the time, university agents (and with only a few exceptions, not universities directly, and as far as I know, no public universities at all) operated on a basis that was highly selective.  That selectivity in turn was comprised of five components:

  1. Inventor or Investigator interest in the invention
  2. Inventor choice of agent
  3. Review by agent for match with expertise and operating model
  4. Review by agent for commercialization opportunity
  5. Negotiated management arrangement

In the thirty or so years since Bayh-Dole, we have seen this selectivity disappear from university practice as technology transfer has moved from an outside practice to an administrative function, and move as well from voluntary to compulsory, and from narrow to comprehensive in claims.   Continue reading →

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Abandoning the Original Arguments

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Vannevar Bush’s Science the Endless Frontier is a pivotal document.  It restates the arguments for the value of research and creates a mandate for the use of public funds in supporting universities both in their basic research and their instruction.  While some parts of Bush’s vision have been implemented–such as the National Science Foundation and research funding–other parts have not, and really should.

Bush stresses the importance of supporting strong centers of basic research.

Publicly and privately supported colleges and universities and the endowed research institutes must furnish both the new scientific knowledge and the trained research workers. These institutions are uniquely qualified by tradition and by their special characteristics to carry on basic research. They are charged with the responsibility of conserving the knowledge accumulated by the past, imparting that knowledge to students, and contributing new knowledge of all kinds. It is chiefly in these institutions that scientists may work in an atmosphere which is relatively free from the adverse pressure of convention, prejudice, or commercial necessity. At their best they provide the scientific worker with a strong sense of solidarity and security, as well as a substantial degree of personal intellectual freedom. All of these factors are of great importance in the development of new knowledge, since much of new knowledge is certain to arouse opposition because of its tendency to challenge current beliefs or practice.

Consider this argument up against the idea that the purpose of research is to create patentable inventions to be dealt to monopoly interests that acquire rights to speculate on the future value products to be sold to industry or consumers.   This form of technology licensing, as soon as it is a compulsory requirement of university employment or use of facilities, and not a voluntary service provided to faculty and inventors by the university, moves the university outside of Bush’s argument.  The university has then abandoned one of its key “unique qualifications” and “special characteristics” that grounded Bush’s argument for public funding.

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Francis Bacon, Vannevar Bush, and Technology Transfer

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Peter Harrison and Benoît Godin trace the history and transformation of two of the critical concepts that underlie the present formula for university research: curiosity and innovation. Remarkably, both concepts have much of their early existence as negative things, to be avoided and denounced, and both undergo a reformation, emerging as virtues. Other key concepts in matters of inquiry and innovation also appear to have had the same transformation, such as “usefulness” and “originality.” At some point, two hundred or so years ago, there was a revolution not in science, but in the moral context for learning. The history of curiosity and innovation, and that of the debate that framed their change in status, still matters today. Indeed, the present representation of “technology transfer” from research is a clear restatement of the justifications that Francis Bacon made for inquiry.

Peter Harrison provides an account of the ways in which curiosity was counted as a vice, along with pride, as something that “puffs up” a person with “worldly wisdom” and creates dangerous ideas that work against the proper operation of society. Bacon has to navigate these objections in order to make a case for curiosity, for inquiry into nature–a nature that has been emblemized and moralized as reflections of civil and religious order. Harrison cites Bacon:

In the concluding remarks of the preface Bacon asks of his readers “that they consider what are the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek it not either for pleasure of the mind, or for contention or for superiority to others, or for profit, or fame, or power, or any of these inferior things; but for the benefit and use of life; and that they perfect and govern it in charity.”

Bacon’s argument might appear silly these days.  Continue reading →

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University IP programs with stewardship elements

Posted on March 11, 2012 by Gerald Barnett

Some university programs do have administrators that are looking at stewardship rather than ownership.  For instance, UC Berkeley and the University of Oregon.   The University of Waterloo works with a voluntary IP program.   If you know of others that are doing this, add a comment or drop me a note.

Update 5/31/16. Here’s a link to a brochure about UC Berkeley’s socially responsible licensing program.

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