Research Enterprise

If we look at AUTM as a membership organization, where the dues are largely paid on behalf of the members by their employers, and ask what positions it has taken recently, we find that overwhelming those positions are with policies that favor corporate controls and administrative convenience. The thrust of AUTM training and policy advocacy is to make inventors comply with the processes and policy AUTM teaches as best practice. It’s a case of being Strictly Ballroom. There is no visible debate within AUTM regarding support for inventors. It would appear that the AUTM ethos is that inventors be respectful and docile, so that the “process” in the tech transfer office has the best chance of success, even if that chance of success is less than 1 in 100 reported inventions will generate $50K+ a year. Quite apart from the good intentions and hopeful practices of individual university-based “technology managers”, the stark reality is that AUTM, as a visible national organization taking policy positions and lobbying government, clearly favors corporate culture and does next to nothing to advocate for inventors, their rights, their role in research or community, and their historic importance, even to the development of technology transfer as an activity–long before technology transfer became isolated, for AUTM, as a management profession aiming to pluck IP rights efficiently and sweetly from compliant university-hosted inventors.

There is something about the nature of the inventor that American society treats very differently from that developing in AUTM written positions. Rather than the university inventor being given resources to connect research with community, AUTM argues–now with a string of universities (meaning technology transfer officers representing their administrations, not their faculty) signing on–that university researchers invent-for-hire–that this is what the law should be, and more so, that this is desirable as national policy. These actions are not respectful of inventors, nor of the distinctive place of university research in society. These actions aim to grind university inventive work into another corporate bureaucracy dedicated to making money on patent rights. Even if such an agenda were to be “successful”, one still could reasonably ask whether making money for random university administrative whims represents a meaningful national policy on public research-originated invention.

When has it been the case that corporate administrative culture has done anything creative? inventive? Does that sound like a good place for things to go? “Why, yes, I’ve got it! we will set up a law so that bureaucrats own all the research results, hire well intentioned administrators and set up shop to make money from licenses. This will be the best thing ever!” Is that *really* what The Economist thought made Bayh-Dole inspired law?

No, honestly, even in the great corporate research centers, the best work appears to have been done outside of the corporate culture, and getting anything through that culture from research to new product was and is a great challenge. Go figure, then, that AUTM sets up to claim that an administrative culture fixated on the unholy union of bureaucratic processes and non-profit money making for money making’s sake (that is, “on principle”) represents the best thing inventors or government officials should dream of for the cultivation of publicly funded research inventions.

AUTM has some explaining to do about why it has ended up on the north side of the DMZ. The apologies for sweet-hearted tech managers and wonderful public outcomes for a handful of licensed inventions over 30 years really has to be set aside. We’re talking thousands of highway accidents and AUTM wants to talk about a night in the backseat after the prom with willing inventors. AUTM doesn’t want to track university litigation–whether infringement litigation or contract disputes or disputes with inventors over policy and administration. I understand why, but that doesn’t change my assessment that AUTM as an organization, formally and publicly, is now become a creature of bureaukleptic, not innovative, values.

Brian Baird (Washington 3d District) made some important contributions to the House Science and Technology subcommittee hearings last Thursday. His challenge for university research is that bright people too often end up doing meaningless things.

Baird asks, “Isn’t there a reward structure for innovation in academia?”

That’s the crux of it. A share of royalties from inventions that get licensed only 1% of the time for significant income isn’t a meaningful academic reward structure for innovation. First, the licensing frequency is an order of magnitude too low. Second, it does not differentiate between patent arbitrage (making money by flipping a patent right) and innovation (adopting and using new technology). Third, making money isn’t an academic reward–it’s set up on the side and isn’t recognized in promotion and tenure, and isn’t reflected in things like extension, sabbatical, and other structures to promote faculty engagement with community.

It’s not a flaw of Bayh-Dole that it doesn’t require universities to be creative, do the right thing, and not focus on the most self-serving bottom line fixation on flipping patent rights. So Baird has it right–time to ask for some accounting from the faculty directly for what they are doing with the opportunity–by-pass the administrative bozonet. Isn’t the present economic crisis and the repeated calls for innovation enough for folks to see it’s not business as usual any more?

That’s the challenge with innovation. Something innovative often points up problems elsewhere in a value chain that prevents the innovation’s benefits from being realized.