Research Enterprise

Here are the seven fitts of the university president’s speech, in order.

• A very exciting day for the university
• Who hoards technology in the Ivory Tower?
• Technemort, the name never to be spoken
• Who ya gonna call?
• Students, creating the value-added for investors
• If we build it you will pay
• We are delighted to help Stanford become a better university [laughter]
• Remarkable leadership

The talk itself was posted at Geekwire. My transcript retains various pause words, as these affect the meaning, which includes tone, hesitation, and searching for the right words or syntax, in addition to content abstracted for its paraphrasable elements.

Why are these speeches always about changing STEM faculty culture to something it already largely is–creative, curious, engaged, dedicated, opportunistic, public-spirited? Why is there such antagonism to faculty taking personal responsibility for their discoveries and developments? Why such an institutional willingness to subsidize venture investment but not faculty, staff, and students? Why such an institutional attraction to monopoly deals? And why doesn’t an incredible failure rate over the past three decades of trying change the institutional rhetoric? We can’t seem to get enough of this stuff, like a reality-TV addiction.

Here are some alternative bits of senior leadership rhetoric to consider: Continue reading →

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 as a rationalization for the $100M effort to flip faculty and student startups to investors for UW profit. I am providing annotations to draw out the implications of the talk, in a series of posts. President Young’s talk is in purple and my comments follow in brown, in square brackets.

Here is a fifth installment, a series of statements and comments, as Mr. Young moves to his dedicatory thoughts.

Uh, all of this is a very long-winded way of saying that this is a complicated process that requires deep, intimate and profound partnerships, and so today we really stand here thanking you for your willingness to be partners in this, in this enterprise. Um, we have made tremendous strides in our capacity to commercialize, and the work that has gone on under Linden’s office uh in terms of uh connecting to the business community, creating much uh smoother transitions, reducing transaction costs, being able to help people see what the possibilities are in terms of research has been nothing short of extraordinary. Absolutely nothing short of extraordinary. Uh, there is only so much we can do within the university because ultimately we have to connect with the business community uh to do the other half of this, of this operation.

[Comment: Mr. Young does not elaborate on what “deep, intimate and profound” partnerships might mean. Nor why the process has to be complicated–other than that administrators insist that partnering with business must follow a process run by administrators. While Mr. Young is willing to say pleasant things about the Center for Commercialization, as is suited to a ceremony of this sort, the actual metrics appear to point to the Center for Commercialization being less effective than UW TechTrans, the previous version of UW’s technology transfer operation. More on that soon. Continue reading →

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 as a rationalization for the $100M effort to flip faculty and student startups to investors for UW profit. I am providing annotations to draw out the implications of the talk, in a series of posts. President Young’s talk is in purple and my comments follow in brown, in square brackets.

Here is a third installment, a double-shot of statement and comment:

Uh, in fact, somebody once described the university as a place that accumulates knowledge because students come in at eighteen years old, they know everything, and we not knowing everything, and what they’ve left behind is what accumulates [laughter] here at the university.

[Comment:  Mr. Young's figure of thought takes the form of a joke at the expense of the university's faculty and research staff. Somehow students bring in new knowledge, and faculty and staff are know-nothings. So on this celebratory day, only a minute into his talk, Mr. Young takes a swipe at the faculty. If students have the bright ideas before they arrive at the university, why should they involve the university at all in their business activities? Why not go straight after their ideas, as Peter Thiel has begged them to do?

Mr. Young’s figure works only if faculty, but for the incubator and other administration-provided technology management services, would hoard their knowledge. But that interpretation makes the figure come off as arrogant, especially in light of the efforts by the university administration to claim ownership of nearly all faculty, staff, and student intellectual property. Continue reading →

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.  Continue reading →

So I got this urge to do some snorkeling in the waters of Black’s Legal Dictionary. Just a little recreational reading. But I’d barely got into the waters–first page, in the A’s–when I hit up against this rock:

Abbroachment. The act of forestalling the market by buying wholesale merchandise to sell it at retail as the only vendor.

That led me to “forestalling the market” (citations omitted):

Forestalling the Market. The act of the buying or contracting for any merchandise or provision on its way to the market, with the intention of selling it again at a higher price; or the dissuading persons from bringing their goods or provisions there; or persuading them to enhance the price when there. This was formerly an indictable offense in England, but is now abolished…

Forestalling differs from “engrossing,” in that the latter consists in buying up large quantities of merchandise already on the market, with a view to effecting a monopoly or acquiring so large a quantity as to be able to dictate prices. Both forestalling and engrossing may enter into the manipulation of what is now called a “corner.”

Once you have engrossed a market, you then can “corner” it.  Continue reading →