A very exciting day for the university

University of Washington president Michael Young gave a ten-minute talk in February 2012 at the opening of a business incubator on the UW campus. The talk is fascinating for the narrative it presents for UW to attempt to flip faculty and student startups to investors for UW profit.

I thought it might be helpful, therefore, to annotate President Young’s speech, so the various threads can be woven into a coherent insight into how a research university president must think about research, intellectual property management, startup companies, and innovation.

Mr. Young is not the only university president championing the university as an economic driver–any number of universities have published some statement of their “economic impact” (Here is one from UW. From UCLA. Minnesota. North Dakota. Florida. UNC Asheville. Stony Brook. Portland State. You get the picture.) Often these studies are vanity press–take some numbers, such as research expenditures, and multiply these numbers by a model-given factor to get a bigger number, and from that bigger number use another model to derive the number of jobs that must depend on the university. I have never seen an independent validation of the claimed figures. There appears to be an industry of consultants with happy economic models that take inputs and create bigger, braggable numbers. If one is into confirmation bias, then economic impact reports are a field of opium poppies.

Let’s take a closer look at President Young’s talk. I will put President Young’s talk in purple with my comments in brown, in square brackets. I will break this up into a number of posts.

President Young:

Thank-you. Speaking of forces of nature. [laughter] Um, I’m delighted to be here today.
This is an exciting day for the University. A very exciting day for the University, an exciting day for our students, for our professors, and we think ultimately an exciting day for the state of Washington.

Comment: In what way is the opening of a business incubator exciting for the state? There are plenty of incubator facilities, co-working facilities, and multi-use buildings in the state. What is added by another? The implication is that unlike those other facilities, the Fluke Hall business incubator will have a state-wide impact greater than that of other facilities. 

Notice, however, that Mr. Young does not say that it is an exciting day for industry in the state of Washington. Perhaps the state’s industries are the losers when a major research university decides to sequester research results in monopoly deals with its own startups in the hope of attracting investors to those companies. The business model indicated is one in which the university hopes to sell off results–perhaps after three or four years–to investors looking to resell the results, in company form, to established companies, or to sue those same companies for infringement if they are unwilling to buy the university’s startups. The university-driven startup model represents an attack on regional industry the moment there’s more money in suing that industry than serving it.

Mr. Young implies a connection between university research and state-wide economic impact. The idea is that the state should look to this particular business incubator for new products, sales revenues, jobs, and royalties that will drive the state’s economy, or at least offset the cost of higher education.

Think about it. Mr. Young’s apparent confidence that the incubator will be successful is also a statement to the legislature that UW is able to generate its own money, thank-you, the public will recover its investment, and the legislature will at some point be able to turn its attention elsewhere. If Mr. Young’s flitting reference is to such a connection, then if the incubator is successful, taxpayers and legislatures will be able to allocate even less public funding to UW. 

And if Mr. Young is not connecting university research to economic impact through UW ownership of inventions through the new incubator, just why is it that the state should be ultimately excited by the opening of yet another incubator?]