
In my own talk, I began by summarizing a comparison of open innovation (Chesbrough), user innovation (von Hippel) and cumulative innovation (Scotchmer). This was based on my EURAM talk last year.
- David Mowery (UC Berkeley) and his edited book on Bayh-Dole
- Marie Thursby (Georgia Tech) who studies university licensing
- Maryann Feldman (U. Georgia) and her book and various papers on university tech transfer
- Scott Shane (Case Western) and his book on academic entrepreneurs.

In this model, universities patent their technologies. They charge a fee for their innovations; for exclusive licensing or contract research, they effectively surrender rights to practice the associated innovations.

My interest in this model was based on my own research on the commercialization of Claude Shannon’s information theory for deep space communications. (The paper will be published in the December 2008 issue of the Journal of Management Studies, as part of a special issue on “Research and Technology Commercialization”). As part of researching our book on the San Diego telecom industry, I found how MIT-trained electrical engineers (including Qualcomm founders Andrew Viterbi and Irwin Jacobs) helped NASA adapt Shannon’s theory to improve communication bandwidth with interplanetary space probes.
I didn’t mean to imply that the technology licensing model is dead, but instead to encourage participants to realize that each model has its role. Formal licensing is always going to be important in some industries (such as biopharma), but for other types of innovations, the spillover model can be more efficient. (Universities can often monetize this with donations from alumni entrepreneurs).
While at the conference, I heard an interesting wrinkle on the spillover model in the talk by Broadcom Chairman Henry Samueli. Samueli is a former UCI professor who’s giving naming grants to the engineering schools at both UCI and UCLA.
Broadcom spends about $1 million a year with universities: all their university grants are as gifts rather than research contracts, to reduce paperwork on both sides. Their goal is to identify prospective Ph.D. students to hire, but I imagine that the gifts also create considerable goodwill with the recipient universities for attracting other bright students.
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