Author Archives: Melba Kurman
A few months ago, Bernie Knight, General Counsel of the USPTO, stated that in order to ensure optimal ROI on tax-payer-funded university research, the Patent Office would likely come out in support of giving universities stronger ownership rights. Some people are surprised to learn that most U.S. research universities own large portfolios of patents and copyrights; universities also stake claim to other by-products of federally funded research created by faculty and students such as research tools, integrated circuit chips, biological organisms, engineering prototypes and data. Right now, federal law (the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980) is somewhat vague about exactly who gets title to the invention, the university inventor or her university. As a result, most universities clarify this grey area by writing intellectual property policies that put them in control of anything invented on campus. How today’s U.S. research universities manage, or protect, their intellectual …
The “tech transfer health index” is a simple but powerful technique to quantify the impact and productivity of the entire long tail curve of technologies in a university’s IP portfolio. Here’s why we should adopt it. When I worked in a university technology transfer office, we spent a lot of time pulling together performance metrics. We had 14 different reports, each with its own subtle nuances and unique methodologies. Needless to say, despite our best efforts, our metrics didn’t reconcile well over time and unintentionally gave the impression that our tech transfer office was somewhat, uh, creative in our accounting. The problem, however, wasn’t just accuracy. Our metrics missed the mark because they didn’t reflect the whole story: we counted mostly technology activity in the head of the long tail curve of distribution – the high-earning technologies, new startups, and issued patents. …
I’ve spent the past week combing thru almost 200 responses to the RFI on improving university commercialization issued last spring by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Technology transfer stakeholders (university administrators, faculty inventors, businesses, non-profits, foundations and private individuals) wrote a variety of recommendations, ranging from cranky one page cover letters to comprehensive and thoughtful recommendations. (I’ll post more later when I get thru all of them). It’s good stuff. Not surprisingly, recommendations are strongly tied to the stakeholder’s role. In my own response to the RFI, I point out that stakeholders seem to be talking past one another from distinct, unconnected silos: inventors offer one set of complaints and recommendations for improvement. Industry people another. University administrators yet offer another and so on. “Constructive discourse is made difficult by a …
An effective university technology transfer model should take advantage of lessons learned from the current process, tap into the power of the free market, use today’s internet technologies, and enlist emerging open innovation paradigms. The good news is that drastic change to today’s university tech transfer process may not be necessary. Let’s call this proposed model the “Plan B” approach since it introduces a second, alternative path to invention commercialization that would complement, rather than replace, the work of the university TTO. This proposed model would maintain the core of today’s university tech transfer model, but would take advantage of the power of the free market, capture the long tail of invention licensing, and make use of open innovation licensing paradigms. In the Plan B approach, universities would give their TTO first right of refusal for new inventions, remaining the first step …
Successfully using small-scale, high risk, high reward pilot programs by Melba Kurman The President of the Windows Division at Microsoft, Steve Sinofsky, is fond of saying “don’t ship the org chart.” What does that mean? It means your product or service (in the software business, a product is completed when it is “shipped” to customers) should reflect your customers’ needs, not your organization’s internal structure and politics. Revenue-dependent organizations such as businesses, intuitively understand this, and if they don’t, they go out of business. It’s not so simple for university business units such as the technology transfer office. On campus, university business units are the campus administrative units that don’t teach or do research. Let’s start with the org chart part. U.S. research universities are split into two major service areas: the teaching and research portion (faculty and students) and the …
Successfully using small-scale, high risk, high reward pilot programs by Melba Kurman Last spring, the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council issued an RFI to collect feedback about university commercialization, including recommendations for more effective models, descriptions of current best practices and better metrics to gauge success. Apparently they’ve been reading the responses and may release a summary of the responses publicly. Federal policy makers should continue in this vein and fund a series of small-scale, test pilot programs to test out people’s suggestions. Small scale, government-funded pilot programs would be cheap, yield fast results and enable a lot of different tech transfer models to be tested. Funding for the pilot programs would be targeted towards small, regional businesses who would define their proposed pilot and if they received funding, would then implement the pilot over the next 2-3 …
University technology transfer methods are ready to meet the Long Tail. What’s the Long Tail? It’s a concept borrowed from statistics; if you imagine a bar chart with a few tall bars followed by a slow curve downwards, that’s a long tail curve. A bar chart that ranks sales of book titles at amazon.com, for instance, displays a classic long tail pattern: a few books sell a lot (the long bars) and a lot of books sell fewer copies (the gradual curve downwards). However, if you add up sales revenue from the more esoteric (i.e. not the New York Times bestsellers) books, their combined total revenue equal a pretty good chunk of income, almost as much as the revenue from the big best sellers. Back when I worked in a tech transfer office at a large research university, I wanted to see which of our technologies …
