Author Archives: Melba Kurman
If universities want to play as participants, not gate-keepers, in our nation’s innovation ecosystem, university administrators need to learn to create a work environment that attracts, motivates and retains high-performing employees. When people talk about issues involved in transforming federally funded university research into products, medicines and companies, little attention is paid to the people who manage the day-to-day operational details. I don’t mean faculty – they’ve got it good: tenure, freedom to set their own agenda, and advancement opportunities galore. No, I mean the administrative staff, the 9-to-5′ers, the unknown soldiers who spend their days hunkered down on the frontlines of the great divide between the university and the rest of the world. University staff employees don’t get much recognition. Professional advancement opportunities inside the university’s patent office are limited. If universities want to play effectively in an era of open innovation, they’re going …
Last week Intellectual Ventures revealed its list of major investors. On it were several major U.S. research universities and research organizations. Brown University Cornell University Grinnell College Mayo Clinic Northwestern University Stanford University University of Minnesota University of Pennsylvania University of Southern California University of Texas You may be asking yourself, so what’s the big deal about a university investing its endowment in Intellectual Ventures? After all, according to conventional dictates of what constitutes as “good investment,” Intellectual Ventures is a real and legitimate company led by a famous and well-established executive team. In fact, over the past decade, it has raised $5 billion from investors and has grown to employ 650 employees and at last count, has accumulated a patent portfolio roughly the size of IBM’s – 30,000 active patents. Sure, the company is the target of controversy and criticism due to its business model, but that hasn’t stopped … Continue reading
Stefan Lindegaard uses a term called “smartfailing” to describe a new approach to failure. A smartfailing organization, when things go wrong (as they frequently will), does not focus its energy on assigning blame and doling out consequences. Instead, the smartfailing organization uses failure to become better. When an organization embraces smartfailing, it de-stigmatizes failure internally and uses failure as an opportunity to learn and to find a better course. The April issue of the Harvard Business Review is dedicated to learning from failure. Story after story from corporate thought leaders seems to indicate that companies are taking steps towards viewing failure as something to be understood and learned from rather than punished or suppressed. If corporations are learning to learn from failure, why not universities? It seems that universities should be even more comfortable with the idea that failure is a learning …
One of the original intentions of the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 was to make federally-funded U.S. university research more readily available to small businesses. It worked. Today, three decades later, universities do a brisk business licensing patents to small, technology-based businesses. Each year, roughly half of the patent licenses that universities sign are to small technology-based firms managed by regional entrepreneurs. These small firms employ fewer than 500 employees, offer their regions high quality technology jobs, and transform early-stage university research into innovative products or services. The chart in the upper right shows the university patent licenses to small businesses, start-ups and large companies – data source: Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). What many people don’t realize is that these small businesses are not the Googles or the “get rich quick” whiz kid start-up that comes up with a radically new product, successfully navigates the …
The vast majority of start-ups with roots in a university are formed by alumni or former students, similar to the process that was depicted in the movie The Social Network. The Zuck had it easy. Since Zuckerberg was a Harvard undergraduate student, not an employee, the university could not lay claim to an ownership stake in Facebook. Had Harvard owned a patent for a core component of Facebook’s technology or business method, the plot of The Social Network may have been different. Imagine the following: Zuckerberg works for Harvard Zuckerberg uses a Harvard computer, network, and proprietary photos of students from Harvard’s various residence halls Zuckerbergs files his invention, as required by his employment contract, with Harvard’s technology commercialization office Harvard files for a patent which costs Harvard $30,000 and lots of staff time and overhead Zuckerberg decides he *must* launch Facebook commercially, and he and his co-founders …
Open Source Hardware by Melba Kurman Patent reform is on everyone’s mind. With a whole lot less fanfare, Version 1.0 of the Open Source Hardware definition was released last week by a community of volunteer hackers, business people, and other experts. Open source hardware is a new way to share design information. It gives inventors the option to eschew a patent and instead, freely publish design details, blueprints and other information about mechanical and electrical inventions (for example robots and printed circuit boards). Version 1.0 of the definition is not yet a license – defining license details will be the next step. Open sourcing software code and hardware designs could be viewed as the ultimate enactment of the spirit of the Bayh Dole Act, whose purpose is to get federally-funded university inventions into widespread, public use. Open source licenses are controversial. Depending on your point of view, …
Start-up patenting strategies have become as sophisticated as those of incumbent companies and start-up patenting costs have reached new heights — the average reported cost of a single patent was $38,000. (See the Kauffman-funded Berkeley Patent Survey of 2008, by Stuart Graham, Tech Sichelman, Robert Merges, and Pam Samuelson). The Survey data on start-up patent strategies offers insight into our current university model of start-up formation. US universities spin off hundreds of new start-ups each year and spend millions of dollars to help their start-ups get patents. By way of background: a university start-up takes shape when an entrepreneur with a passion for the university-owned technology – typically the faculty member or student who invented the technology — licenses it from the university. New university-based start-ups, like most start-ups, want patents but don’t have the money to pay outside attorneys. To help their …
