Among other findings, survey responses suggest that: Patenting high-tech inventions made on university campuses may not be a profitable undertaking, even at those universities best-positioned to profit from tech transfer. Based on the patenting and licensing activities of survey respondents, I estimate that university patent programs earn a negative 3.5% rate of return on high-tech patents. The prospect of obtaining patent rights to the fruits of their research does not motivate university researchers in high-tech fields to conduct more or better research. Eighty-five percent of professors report that patent rights are not among the top four factors motivating their research activities. Moreover, fifty-seven percent of professors report that they do not know how, or if at all, their university shares licensing revenue with inventors. University patent programs may, instead, actually reduce the quantity and quality of university research in high-tech fields by harming professors’ ability to obtain research funding, to collaborate with faculty from other institutions, and to disseminate their work to their colleagues. University patent programs are, at best, a modest benefit to professors seeking to commercialize high-tech academic research.
Entrepreneurial professors report that these programs hinder their ability to work as a consultant with companies that show interest in their research, and fewer than half of university spinoff founders report that the ability to patent their research affirmatively helped their commercialization efforts.
Abstract from Brian Love, UC Santa Clara.
2. Do professors know what they should be researching?
See: Cowen and Tabarrok, discussing, in part, how tenure removes discipline of market, and why academics, like artists, may need that discipline if the goal is increased profits.
From the conclusion:
The market for publications and tenured jobs constrains economists in the same way that the market for art constrains artists. The model also predicts that tenure is unlikely to greatly reduce the quantity of publications, a prediction borne out by the data.30 Our model also helps to explain the increasing distance between what consumers of economics desire and what economists produce. Economics is often attacked for being too abstract, irrelevant, and impractical. Such attacks are the counterpart to attacks on artists for being too self-indulgent and inaccessible. As economic growth increases, economists choose to take more of their net wage in the form of choice of project. They choose to work on the peculiarities of the art market rather than serving as consultants to the business world.
Economists, of course, are not the sole targets of critical attacks; such attacks pervade academic life and have been levelled at philosophers, English professors, and theoretical physicists, among others. In each case practitioners make the argument that in the long run high theory makes good practice; there is some evidence for this in the art market and economics, as well as in the hard sciences. Nonetheless the cause of increasing irrelevance is found in the preferences of the suppliers and not in the internalization of some future, unknown, demand.
See also http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2014/07/the-case-for-engaged-legal-scholarship.html
No comments:
Post a Comment