Category Archives: Metrics
The urge to tech transfer
Technology transfer refers to the movement of capability from one group to another. Three conventional forms are from a developed country to a developing country (send in the tractors, there have to be tractors); from one industry to another (wifi … Continue reading
Opening up subject invention reporting
In the last post, I suggested a new reporting for subject inventions. Nothing like this presently exists. The ubiquitous university licensing survey aggregates information and therefore becomes useless for tracking subject inventions. And misleading.
Improving periodic reporting
Bayh-Dole is not a perfect law by any means. But what are the weak points? Where can things be improved? Here is one suggestion. In 35 USC 202(c)(5) funding agreements are required to have language to permit agencies to request … Continue reading
Limitation and Focus
It is easy to confuse focus and limitation. Focus selects valuable things from diversity and mobilizes resources and sticks with an effort to achieve a goal. Limitation cuts off consideration of opportunity and sets up rules to make things simple. … Continue reading
Metrics of “technology untransfer”
Stuff arising in research is hardly technology. Research deals in glimmers and epiphanies, arguable discovery and hypothesis, data and more data, theory formation and creative destruction of theory. In all this, research inventions are not, generally, technology, and transfer does … Continue reading
Is This as Good as It Gets?
One of the biggest problems with university technology transfer is that it cannot manage deliberative rhetoric. Everything is criticism, and the criticism is construed to attack the idea of technology transfer, Bayh-Dole, and/or the competency of those working in the … Continue reading
Here’s what I mean
Nick White over at the LinkedIn SpinOut group, which I like a lot, points to this story put out by the University of Edinburgh. The University claims 40 start ups in a year, raising £3m in start up financing. A … Continue reading
Hmpf, vol. 2
I came by a report by The Science Coalition called “Sparking Economic Growth: Federal Funding + University Research = Innovation, Companies and Jobs“. Title says it all. The Science Coalition says it is “a non-profit, nonpartisan organization of 50 fo … Continue reading
Cooperative Competition
The Tour de France finished up at the end of July. The strategies of bicycle racing help to illustrate the practical nature of competition. In bicycle racing, there’s a mechanical advantage in being behind another racer. Trailing racers move into … Continue reading
Optimal Boeufmerde
The Kauffman Foundation (reminder: co-funds RTEI but has nothing to do with this blog or my opinions) suggested in a recent proposal that university licensing practice was “sub-optimal”. This has gotten the rile up in the lost territorial alley dog … Continue reading