I make this claim: The most important innovation metric of a university technology transfer program is the number of unlicensed inventions for which patent rights are claimed.
I argue that unlicensed patents suppress collaboration and innovation, work to the advantage of the status quo, and create uncertainties that do more damage than licensing does good. If all this obvious to you, then no need to read further. Continue reading
This is a speech I’d like to hear from a university president. I’ve imagined a lunch keynote, in a mountain retreat, to folks interested in innovation, technology transfer, and commercialization. Put your dream caps on, folks, imagine tall Douglas fir trees all around, salmon and asparagus on your plate, with some cornbread on the side… Continue reading
Steve Fiore has started an interesting discussion over at Science of Science Policy’s distribution list. One article he cites shows that negative results are disappearing from scientific journals. Another shows that a reported effect appears to decline over time as people attempt to replicate results.
To this list I add two more. First, John Ioannidis has shown that a large percentage of articles published in major journals turn out to be wrong. This is not just scientific progress overtaking early findings, but that the findings themselves are simply in error, misreported, poorly analyzed.
We also have to contend with the idea of “post-normal” science. Consider: Continue reading
Here are five things many research university presidents need to hear:
1. You are losing money to extramural research administration and folks are raiding instructional programs and tuition to make up their losses. Change this.
2. Your tech transfer office is operating with a failed innovation model and in desperation seeks compulsory ownership of inventions. Stop this.
3. What’s the point of tech transfer licensing if you have no worthy public uses for the income? Find these.
4. Your faculty and the broader community need choice in methods and agents to be effective with research and innovation. Create these.
5. If you want a big impact in your community, you will have to be out in front of ideas and discoveries, early and often, for a decade. Do this.
I’m reading The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steven Blank. Consider this: “The difference between winners and losers is simple. Products developed with senior management out in front of customers early and often – win. Products handed off to a sales and marketing organization that has only been tangentially involved in the new Product Development process lose. It’s that simple.”
Perhaps it is that simple. If universities are going to implement a compulsory ownership policy for inventions, then if they really want success in licensing, it’s the university president, provost, and deans that have to be out in front, early and often, talking up the inventions with potential users and developers. Not some process-oriented set of middle managers, no matter that they have “business experience” or Ph.D.s in biochemistry. Doesn’t matter. Continue reading
A new bill to rewrite parts of Bayh-Dole is under review. Here is a write up about it. The idea is that a panel would be set up to explore some portion of royalties on government funded inventions would go back to the government to be spent on, apparently, more research. Of course, the government already gets a return on inventions that are successful through the taxes paid on royalties by inventors and by companies that sell product based on the inventions, and for that matter the money paid to patent attorneys to do the patenting work, so taxing royalties again would appear to be an effort to go after the money that’s left to the universities after the recovery of expenses.
It’s not a good idea. It’s a very bad idea as presently framed, akin to the problems that CIRM had with implementing an IP policy for stem cell research in California. It is either a royalty stack (a government royalty on top of a private one) or a tax on the royalty stream (taxing, in the case of universities, non-profits–may as well call it unrelated business income and tax it that way).
Aside from thumping on the badness of it all, I’m interested in the quotes from folks regarding it the purpose of those royalties, such as they are, that some in government want to get a share of. Continue reading
In the previous post, I discussed the problem of accumulating a patent portfolio as a way to generate licensing income. A portfolio approach can be financially successful, but in a patent world, it needs only one or two hits a decade. The rest of the portfolio can be wasting asset and it doesn’t matter: that is the job of the rest of the portfolio in such a model.
From this we find that:
*The accumulate-to-license exclusively model works infrequently by design. No amount of extra funding or effort will change its proven dynamics. You cannot buy innovation markets with patent threats. You can make money, however, and call that “success”.
*The effect of university administrators acting on Bayh-Dole is to sequester and render uncertain nearly a million research events that rise to the level of invention over the past 30 years.
*The accumulation model undermines academic publishing by preventing researchers and practitioners from being able to use the publications to do further research, to use, or to help others use. First they must take a license from administrators who under the influence of their model care only about making money from the sale of commercial products or companies trying to make them.
*The “funding gap” often cited by university administrators as a reason for the lack of licensing is largely an artifact of the model itself. There are funding gaps, but the funding gap university patent administrators are talking about is a product of their own policies and practices. These practices have made the naturally occurring funding gaps deeper and more difficult.
*The simplistic narrative of research-invention-license-money is true to the extent that it can often be constructed after the fact, but is a proven lousy guide to policy and practice. Trying to make life imitate art is tough enough. Making life imitate bad policy is not on the road to an innovation society.
Next, we explore the effect of unlicensed, patented research inventions.
At the Pacific Northwest Economic Region conference in Portland a couple of weeks ago, I introduced the idea of a Make-Use Commons as a means of tying together research patent management and regional economic development. 
Let’s work through this idea. The starting point is ordinary university technology transfer. This has been reduced to a simple story: Continue reading
The Supreme Court ruling in Stanford v Roche makes it clear that the Bayh-Dole Act does not vest title in inventions with universities, does not mandate that universities take title, does not constrain inventors to assign only to their university employer, nor gives a university the “right” to take ownership of inventions.
The university right to “retain” title arises only as a term of agreement between the university and government. If the university obtains title to an invention made with federal funds, then it can “retain” that title by complying with the patent rights clause in the funding agreement in which the invention was made.
Any policy, practice, or educational material that states, assumes, implies, or suggests otherwise is in error, and if left unchanged after the Supreme Court ruling could undermine agreements under which inventions are assigned to the university. Continue reading
Over at TT2.0, Melba Kurman asks if university technology transfer is under-resourced or under-achieving. Melba raises very good points about the debate, including the efforts of the Department of Commerce to solicit input about technology transfer, which then just sits, and the problem of “role bias” leading folks to plump for whatever happens to be their best line of self-interest.
In addition to the “underachievers” and the “underfunders” there is something else going on. My sense is that American university tech transfer, the way it is set up now, is operating about as well as it can, and in many places it is underfunded to do that. Continue reading
