It is time to get back to writing here. I will resume by pointing to a new article by Brian Potter at Construction Physics on Bell Labs, “What Would It Take to Recreate Bell Labs?” Potter identifies a number of characteristics that contributed to the many technological developments created at Bell Labs–including:
- embedded in a huge government-regulated company monopoly
- a leader who wanted a productive laboratory to justify a monopoly in the public interest
- lots of development resources, less research
- a huge initial successful technology development (signal amplification)
- access to a rich set of problems
- urgent need informing activity and collaboration
- ability to rapidly test and modify new ideas
- being in the right place at the right time
- could get to new ideas first with more resources than others
- after 1956, was required to license its patents
Consider the present university research enterprise. How many of the characteristics of Bell Labs in its heyday do you see? University research typically lacks development capability (which is supposed to be done by exclusive patent licensees), Universities are not embedded in going activities generating a rich set of problems with urgent needs. Yes, finding a cure for cancer is an urgent need, especially to every individual diagnosed with cancer–but university research has pivoted toward decades-long drug development and disregards the urgent need in favor of an abstracted need that produces federal funding in the form of grants. And what about being in the right place at the right time? How can a university patent policy deal with that? Once an organization has become an omnibus–with engines and wheels pointed in every direction at once–how does it reconfigure to focus on something that does show up, where it could be at the right place at the right time? How can one dismantle so much activity and administration to be on time to what is likely a unique opportunity? No, universities conceive research as a continuous state “industry”–even research for its own sake as long as the federal government accepts that idea. Research as a public good instead of the results of insight (however come by) as the public good.
This distinction is captured even in the Bayh-Dole Act, carried over from the Kennedy’s 1963 patent policy: “practical application”–an invention is being made “under such conditions as to establish that the invention is being utilized and that its benefits are …. available to the public on reasonable terms.” But this bit of Bayh-Dole is attacked by university administrators and the service organizations that feed on university licensing efforts. To their mind, the public is served when a university makes money from licensing and polishes its reputation by having made money. I will mention only that making money in an exclusive license deal may have nothing to do with getting an invention used (it may result in just the opposite), and even if an invention does get used, it may not be available to the public on reasonable terms. Just try to get any university administrator to be candid about their work on that point.
It’s not the research and not the patents and not even the (rare) license–it’s the benefits available to the public on reasonable (i.e., non-exclusive or as if non-exclusive) terms (including necessarily, price). This is quite contrary to the universities’ adoption of the patent monopoly fallacy–that only with company monopolies will anything new become beneficial to the public. There’s nuance there–after all, AT&T was determined to become a public monopoly, but there’s a lot to consider to get from that goal to universities determined to license the patents they acquire exclusively or not at all.
Could any sort of improvements in a “technology transfer system” mediated by administrators and licensing professionals ever hope to get to a new Bell Labs? No. Really, no. Even if we had the conditions that were present when Bell Labs launched, a university as it is presently configured would be a poor foundation. And we don’t have those external conditions, either, in addition to universities not able or willing to create the internal conditions that ought to be present as well.
I will leave it to you to read Potter’s article to find out what he thinks is possible today.
