Patrick Jones, Ph.D.
Director, Office of Technology Transfer, University of Arizona
Stephen O'Neil, Ph.D.
Manager, Special Projects and Outreach Services, Office of Technology
Transfer, University of Arizona
|
|
Patrick Jones
|
|
|
Stephen O'Neil
|
Technology transfer offices (TTOs) at research-intensive universities in the
United States typically operate under broad, and sometimes fluidly defined,
mandates. Among their articulated, societal objectives are protecting, managing,
and making available to others for further development the patents and other
intellectual property arising within the parent university's broader research
mission. Financial objectives for technology transfer, such as generating
revenue to support research or to provide incentive for researcher
participation, are either left implicit or encoded as a search for equitable
return to their institution.
In a perfect market, where all players are rational, foresightful, and fully
informed, those objectives would presumably be naturally aligned. But in the
practical world of early-stage inventions, imperfectly characterized markets are
less efficient, and university TTOs can find themselves pulled in different
directions by a misalignment of their explicit, societal objectives and their
more implicit, financial objectives. Which type of objective is emphasized for a
particular case is often determined somewhat opportunistically: the more
immediate the perceived commercial applications and financial return, the more
attentive the invention management by the TTO, with others managed primarily to
preserve potential future revenues or to limit liability, and the rest managed
less attentively with the hope that they will contribute, eventually, to
societal good.
At the operations level, TTOs have evolved a range of models for managing
university inventions. For those with apparent commercial value, patent and
software licensing protocols have been developed and partially formalized,
time-intensive evaluation and protection models have been established, and
occasional runaway successes have been widely noted and used as beacons. For
other innovations, of the "eventual societal good" type, TTOs have been less
active in organizing an orderly but expedited flow from researchers to
colleagues at other institutions, companies willing to informally but
purposefully "play" with the invention, and creative individuals. For this
second group of innovations, usually assumed to be in the substantial
majority, the technology transfer office might best serve its articulated
mission by carefully defining general dissemination channels and thereafter
disintermediating itself, to the greatest extent feasible, from particular
transactions.
What Have We Learned?
During the year or so that the iBridge Network pilot has been running, a
small group of institutions and their partners in the Kauffman Innovation
Network have gathered enough data to draw some initial conclusions. The first is
that adopting traditionally TTO-intermediated protocols to a network of
individual actors is a slow process because to do so with acceptable risk and
within university policy has required the development of new processes. The TTOs
are not reluctant to diminish or, in some circumstances, eliminate their direct
involvement in the technology transfer process. In fact, for routine
transactions of a repetitive nature, this would be a welcome reprieve. For
example, it took some time before the pilot institutions cleanly articulated the
bounds of the "authorized signature" problem and then collaboratively identified
an acceptable solution that is extensible to cases in which individual
researchers act on behalf of their institution.
A second insight has been that while it is impossible to eliminate the risk
inherent in moving toward a fully software-based technology transfer agent, it
is sometimes sufficient to mitigate the risk to a level close enough to that of
a traditional TTO-based procedure. The benefits gained from increased visibility
and greater efficiency offset any residual difference in the risk level. To this
end, a general approach has slowly evolved: reduce the number of ways that a
transaction can go "off track" by carefully defining the protocols by which
individual researchers may post their technologies, or acquire the technologies
of others, and closely confine the flow of any funds transferred. If the initial
and final boundary conditions of transactions are well enough defined, then the
system, even if not monitored by TTOs on a case by case basis, is likely to be
well behaved.
An example of a meta-lesson learned from the iBridge Network pilot is that
research universities, although possessing distinctly individual personalities,
can, indeed, collaborate to take substantial steps in addressing significant
mutual interests. In this regard, the Kauffman Innovation Network and the
iBridge Network might be playing the role of, say, the National Science
Foundation and a high-energy particle accelerator facility, respectively, in
fostering collaboration and providing a concrete focal point for
multi-institutional efforts.
Exploring institution versus individual stereotypes has offered another
lesson, namely, that individual researchers sometimes adopt stances that the
iBridge Network hypothesis associates with TTOs. For example, researchers might
not welcome the possibility that biological materials from their laboratories
could be ordered online, like a commodity. Instead, some strongly prefer a
direct part in authorizing a transfer. A mechanism for doing that, in a manner
consistent with institutional signature authorities, will be required and has
come into partial view.
Finally, the pilot institutions have learned the importance of building
procedures through which their respective office systems, such as technology
databases, are meshed with the common repository as part of the iBridge Network.
This allows for equal efficiency for "one-off" asset postings by individual
researchers and for en-masse postings and subsequent manipulation by the TTOs.
Meeting this goal is essential as the iBridge Network grows to include both
institutions substantially less active in technology transfer than are the pilot
institutions, and some that are substantially more active.
To date, the hypothesis underlying the iBridge Network remains viable and
under vigorous test, with hard-won advances to date sustaining initial optimism.
With the experience gained, the answer to the question posed in the title to
this article may be tentatively given as: Yes, TTOs can manage their own
disintermediation in some cases although probably not all, provided that the
creative involvement of institutions currently participating and those to join
in the future is matched by the patience required to develop a new mode of
technology transfer. The pilot universities' early experience with the iBridge
Network suggests that meeting the challenges ahead might well be possible, but
will require the same degree of innovation by the technology transfer offices
themselves as they have traditionally urged upon the researchers whom they
represent.
This essay is an excerpt from the
Kauffman Thoughtbook 2007. To view a table of contents for the 2009 edition, or to order a printed copy of the publication,
please visit our 2009 Thoughtbook page 
