Waking the sleeping giant

Dr Roya Ghafele (University of Oxford), a one-time member of the IP Finance team and a respected commentator on a variety of issues involving the interface of IP legal issues with the so-called real world, writes to tell us that she has recently recently completed some analysis on the means to finance university research, "Financing University Research Waking a Sleeping Giant", which she thought might be of interest to readers of the blog.

Roya's paper discusses the "Third Way", about which she has this to say:

"The ‘Third Way’ of university research commercialization focuses on systemic change, rather than on single stakeholder intervention. It reflects a third generation of innovation policies that focuses on training, awareness raising and the leverage of cluster effects, rather than the development of physical infrastructure (i.e. science parks).

This is a unique approach that outperforms existing best practice in many ways; i.e. it focuses on the leverage of network effects among the various academic institutions, rather than repeating the traditional ‘one university – one commercialization’ approach.

The ‘Third Way’ also outperforms existing best practices by adopting latest trends in IP management , such as online trading, perceiving IP as financial asset, leveraging open innovation for improving patent quality.

Organizational values, structures & procedures of various actors (business, academia, government) are recognized and different institutional cultures are sought to be overcome through boundary spanning.

The competing demands and interests of business & academia are reflected through the introduction of ‘social responsible university research commercialization’, as currently undertaken by U.C. Berkeley".

You can view the analysis in the form of PowerPoint slides here.