Tag Archives: technology transfer

How I got into this mess

I got my start in university technology transfer as a graduate student at the University of Washington. I was working toward a doctorate in literature and interpretation. My dissertation dealt with the representation of text, using medieval manuscripts as a … Continue reading

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PhRMA loves Bayh-Dole but won’t out and say why

PhRMA, a pharmaceutical industry lobbying group, has published a white paper championing Bayh-Dole. What they are after is to prevent the Bayh-Dole march-in provisions from ever operating. To do this, they make a variety of assertions about Bayh-Dole that can’t … Continue reading

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Banging Our Hearts Against the Wall

Now that an arguably effective national infrastructure for dealing with inventions made by university faculty has been systematically dismantled over three decades in favor of institutionally self-serving patent administration, it is difficult to see a road back to pre-Bayh-Dole management. … Continue reading

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Well, if you don’t like these five things, I’ve got others.

Innovation Daily has just published “Five Things Technology Transfer Offices Wish Their Start-ups Knew.” This appears to be based on a presentation the author made at the last AUTM meeting. Perhaps that’s why the piece argues that university IP offices … Continue reading

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Competing Primitive Narratives of Technology Transfer

I have noticed recently how merely having a reasonable account for something doesn’t mean that one has got the one and only reasonable account. Todorov, that critical theorist that folks in tech transfer have never heard of, says that there’s … Continue reading

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The Plutonomy

Chris Newfield, writing in his occasional blog on the woes of the middle class, discusses innovation in a list of the “core concepts of the current system” in the US (where Right/Radical is somewhat equivalent to “Republican” and Conservative means … Continue reading

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Francis Bacon, Vannevar Bush, and Technology Transfer

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 … Continue reading

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Limits of Causation Models in Technology Transfer

There is an article by Jonah Lehrer in the latest Wired magazine that is worth the read. It’s called “Trials and Errors” with the subtitle “Dead-end experiments, useless drugs, unnecessary surgery. Why Science is Failing Us.” Lehrer discusses the growing … Continue reading

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Two Yesses

The idea of innovation is complicated. Benoît Godin has shown in a series of articles that innovation until the last hundred years or so has been a derogatory term.  No one wanted to be called an innovator. Then in science, … Continue reading

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