Research Enterprise

While I’m not taken with compulsory ownership IP systems for American universities, there are still really good reasons to work with a university IP office, and even to want a university to own your IP. It’s all about choice, capability, and opportunity.

1. Set the tone for your team

If you put your IP with the university, you set an example for others in your research team. Continue reading →

Most US universities have now moved to compulsory ownership IP policies. This is a huge mistake and is damaging American innovation and subverting the rationale for the federal government to promote university research. We will deal later with why compulsory university IP programs are bad for research innovation; how the arguments given don’t hold up; and why the evidence for “success” doesn’t support the claims being made. We will also go after limitations and fallacies of compulsory ownership IP policy for research innovation.

Here, however, the focus is on how to avoid or mitigate the claims of compulsory IP ownership programs.

For any given approach proposed here, you will have to check the details of your university’s IP policy, your employment agreement, and any funding agreements that support work. If you can, decide early to keep good things out if they need to be out, before you make things that carry ownership claims—especially inventions, software, data, and prototypes. Once you see the strategy, the particular choice of implementation should be pretty clear.

What follows is not legal advice. Get that from your attorney. Keep in mind that attorneys at a university don’t typically imagine that they work for faculty or staff employees. They tend to work for senior administration.

We will develop each of these strategies in more detail in later posts. For now, here’s the list and for each, a brief statement of strategy.

Continue reading →

University technology transfer programs now routinely advocate for policies under which the university claims ownership of inventions made by faculty and staff, and sometimes students, visiting scholars, and volunteers.  These policies then hand control of these inventions to the university patent licensing office.  There, most inventions die, casualties of patent accumulation, portfolio thinking, lack of resources, narrow operating models, and regulatory overhead.

It’s not like every invention would reach practical application anyway.  Inventiveness does not mean practicality, economy, competitive timing, or imaginative interest.  One invention may be made obsolete by another.  There are many reasons why an invention might not be fully developed.  The idea that there are inventions “just sitting on shelves” at universities is pretty goofy.  Are inventions like dead parrots, pining for the fjords? Continue reading →