Hello Heather,
Thanks very much for having an AMA.
I'm working at the intersection of open science, academia, and innovation and would love to know whether you have any experience with investing in/supporting projects that originated in academic settings? If so, what advice academics should have when considering this path? and (if you have the bandwidth to answer three questions) how do you convince the institutions themselves to support an open commercialization pathway?
I work in Canada and most of the university policies on innovation and IP have exactly 0 understanding of (and therefore support for) open source as a viable pathway. In fact, they usually end up getting in the way because those policies tend to equivocate "invention" and "commercialization" with highly restrictive IP instruments (e.g., patents and full copyright protection). They often create this really weird perverse incentive where, if an academic develops and shares something under an open source license then anyone else can use it to make money without having to tithe to the institution, but if the inventor themselves wants to commercialize it they have to give 10% revenue (not even net) to the institution, which effectively kills the effort.
You are right. Universities have come very slowly to understanding OSS or any kind of open knowledge. But it's worse than that, they don't really understand "soft IP." They tend to be very entrenched in a model that goes like this: professors or researchers on their payroll develop inventions, those are patented, and the university licenses them to the inventor (or others) for royalties. I have literally had a university OTL send me a patent license when we wanted to license software or data!
Also, when you are dealing with a university OTL, you are often dealing with a contract lawyer or paralegal who has no authority to negotiate standard patent licensing terms.
This is an education problem, and it's tough. The best you can usually do is get the ear of the head of OTL, who can make decisions, and try to convince them. BTW I think the University of California has some good policies about this. security.ucop.edu/resources/open-s...
You might encourage local universities to take a page from their careful consideration of the topic.
Thanks a bundle for confirming my experience and the link to the UC resource! I had not encountered it before. Because CAN universities often end up following what the US does it is veeery useful to have this kind of example to point to.
Hello Heather,
Thanks very much for having an AMA.
I'm working at the intersection of open science, academia, and innovation and would love to know whether you have any experience with investing in/supporting projects that originated in academic settings? If so, what advice academics should have when considering this path? and (if you have the bandwidth to answer three questions) how do you convince the institutions themselves to support an open commercialization pathway?
I work in Canada and most of the university policies on innovation and IP have exactly 0 understanding of (and therefore support for) open source as a viable pathway. In fact, they usually end up getting in the way because those policies tend to equivocate "invention" and "commercialization" with highly restrictive IP instruments (e.g., patents and full copyright protection). They often create this really weird perverse incentive where, if an academic develops and shares something under an open source license then anyone else can use it to make money without having to tithe to the institution, but if the inventor themselves wants to commercialize it they have to give 10% revenue (not even net) to the institution, which effectively kills the effort.
You are right. Universities have come very slowly to understanding OSS or any kind of open knowledge. But it's worse than that, they don't really understand "soft IP." They tend to be very entrenched in a model that goes like this: professors or researchers on their payroll develop inventions, those are patented, and the university licenses them to the inventor (or others) for royalties. I have literally had a university OTL send me a patent license when we wanted to license software or data!
Also, when you are dealing with a university OTL, you are often dealing with a contract lawyer or paralegal who has no authority to negotiate standard patent licensing terms.
This is an education problem, and it's tough. The best you can usually do is get the ear of the head of OTL, who can make decisions, and try to convince them. BTW I think the University of California has some good policies about this. security.ucop.edu/resources/open-s...
You might encourage local universities to take a page from their careful consideration of the topic.
Thanks for the question!
Thanks a bundle for confirming my experience and the link to the UC resource! I had not encountered it before. Because CAN universities often end up following what the US does it is veeery useful to have this kind of example to point to.
UC did a lot of forward thinking about it, partially in the hope of creating an example. I hope it works!