Over the past year, I have travelling the world. Earlier this year I was in Asia, stopping by AUTM Asia. Right now I am wrapping up a five week swing through Europe that included ASTP in Berlin, a session on student IP at PraxisUnico in Great Britian, and a training for universities in Russia and a speech at a university-industry collaboration meeting in Turkey.
If there is one theme that what comes through clearly it is this: the US model is not the "right" model for anyone else. As a speaker from MIT said at the Turkey meeting, what was done in the US did not take place overnight and it required the social/cultural milieu of America. Equally significant is that the focus of TTOs outside the US needs to be on intellectual assets in general, not just on IP, which after all is just a small subset of the intellectual assets of a university. In Europe, the emphasis on knowledge sharing goes a long way towards broadening the assets included in the TTO mission. But most importantly, we know most US TTOs lose money for their universities. For Russia, that is just not an option. They have a very short time to become cash flow positive. If they do not, those folks will lose their jobs. Similar pressures exist in Turkey and across South America. Never forget these are countries with large amounts of poverty and a wide range of basic needs – like (in some) being able to drink the water without worrying about getting ill.
The take-away is that to encourage people outside the US to adopt the US “licensing and spin-out emphasis” model for TTOs is not particularly helpful – and when you talk to them privately they are very upfront in saying that.
It is helpful to provide task specific nuts and bolts on topics that apply across any model: how to do market research, how to negotiate a license, ways of working with student interns and student entrepreneurs, etc. The problem is, we (as AUTM) don’t really have unique expertise in these areas. LES, other associations, and many companies and individuals can do it as well as AUTM. So from a membership marketing standpoint, or from a service marketing standpoint, these kinds of programs are ancillary benefits but not enough on their own to stimulate anyone to join AUTM.
As I reflect on my experiences there is a second theme. It is not just Turkey, Russia, Chile, Ghana, etc. need to figure out what technology transfer and commercialization of university research means in the 21st Century. We in the US need to too. The US model is itself broken and needs revision. Think about it. We take it for granted that it is OK to lose money because of all the missions a TTO does. But that means we are taking money away from the core educational and research missions of the university. God forbid Kauffman or a Tea Party, budget cutting Congressional Committee Chair ever latch onto that. I would not want to be the one who has to explain why all this technology is so valuable that we need TTOs to capture the benefit of private exploitation of public goods (research results) and then we lose money by doing so. We also assume it is equally valuable to commercialize a technology like Botox as better water purification technology.
So what AUTM can do to be really helpful for our colleagues around the world is the same thing we can do to be really helpful for those of us in the US. We need to be organizing a series of global dialogues on:
1) what are the range of intellectual assets we have to play with;
2) where the profession’s ethical codes and operational metrics need to go to better contribute to core missions of our institutions;
3) whether there are cash flow positive models work for TTOs in different contexts and conditions in order to align with the metrics (being cash flow positive, by the way, would itself be a big contribution – just ask your institution’s President);
4) ways to conduct core tasks (market research, negotiations, etc.) in ways that better contribute to core missions and better align with metrics.
Of course, this list is not exhaustive. And activities in thse area have to feed back into our traditonal bvenefits, such as the Practice Guide, metrics surveys, profesisonal development training, etc. In short, what makes it worthwhile to join is to play a role in the emergance of a global profession with global perspectives, national creativity and adaptations (act locally, think globally), and the global job mobility and career advancement in which a lucky few of us already have begun participating.
This kind of dialogue only works if we recognize we in the US have as much to learn as our colleagues elsewhere. This is not to discount US experience. There is much of value to share. It is to say we are in a period of major transformation. In this light books like Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolution, James Utterback’s Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation, or Thurman Arnolds, The Folklore of Capitalism are useful reminders of the dangers of believing solutions developed in one era remain as useful in another when the conditions for their utility have changed.