The Rochester Institute of Technology was not the likeliest of institutions to lead a revolution in the way universities think about partnerships with companies.
Luckily, nobody told that to Bill Destler.
Two years ago, as RIT’s new president, Mr. Destler began to champion a new approach to the sometimes-stormy negotiations surrounding corporate-research relationships, believing the dissonance was nothing less than a threat to America’s economic competitiveness.
A key problem: Too many starry-eyed universities dreaming of financial windfalls from that potential blockbuster patent were driving away companies with unrealistic demands for intellectual-property rights.
That was bad for the companies, which could benefit hugely from the talent on campuses, and bad for the universities, which have come to increasingly look to industry for financial support. Industry’s $2.7-billion in annual spending for university-based research now accounts for more than 5 percent of all research support at American universities.
Looking to make RIT a test bed for a new approach, Mr. Destler took to the stump, arguing in speeches and op-eds that it was time for universities and companies to break from common practice, stop the haggling, and simply let corporations own the inventions or other intellectual property that might result from the work they sponsored.
Predictably, some found Mr. Destler’s proposals naïve—a strategy that would amount to little more than a giveaway allowing corporations to reap the benefits of university assets. Mr. Destler says he never saw that as a problem: “What is wrong with a corporation finding that it can do research more cheaply by using a university?” he asked when we spoke about the program this month.
Others who follow the business of academic research (myself among them) thought him a little presumptuous. After all, his call for this bold “new relationship” wasn’t all that different from the suggestions that universities be less protective of their intellectual property, an idea already being promoted by tech-transfer leaders like the University of Washington’s Gerald Barnett. (The Chronicle ran an article about his efforts in 2004, during his stint at the University of California at Santa Cruz.) Many similar ideas for simpler corporate partnerships were also brewing in discussions then under way among dozens of colleges and companies working with groups like the National Academy of Sciences University-Industry Demonstration Partnership.
Yet years later, many of those other proposals and discussions remain just that.
In Rochester, meanwhile, officials report that in the last fiscal year, the Corporate R&D at RIT program has attracted support from eight companies, all of them local and two of them small start-ups, sponsoring 15 separate projects that employed a total of 23 master’s-degree students. The $810,000 RIT takes in from the program is just a small fraction of the institute’s $58-million in sponsored research —and still less than 10 percent of the $11-million coming from industry. RIT may still have a fairly small research profile, but officials there see the program as a success that others should emulate.
Clear Rules, Good Results
Many outsiders have come to agree, and not only those at companies, where you’d expect them to like this kind of approach. An executive at one of RIT’s partners, a Rochester-area subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, says that it’s perfect “for smaller problems” and that he loves not having to spend three months negotiating terms.
Folks from the National Academies’ project and from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which has been pushing universities to become more business-friendly, say one reason the program works is that is has visible support from the top. The rules of the program—and its costs—are also clear. The price for a project involving one student, one faculty supervisor, and the fee for ownership of the IP, is about $25,000 per quarter. That includes money to cover the university’s full overhead costs, a neat trick in an environment where companies usually balk at paying full freight. (It may help that RIT’s overhead rate is relatively low.)
The model is “disruptive” in a good way, says Anthony M. Boccanfuso, who runs the National Academies’ project.
Rochester was also smart in the way it set limits on the program. Only certain kinds of research, typically work that would be suitable for master’s-level students supervised by a faculty member, are eligible. That makes it less likely that a fundamental (and potentially valuable) new discovery will result from the work. (For the more complex projects, which RIT is still quite eager to attract, it uses the more typical approach: Companies can negotiate for rights to license research results but they don’t get to own them.)
In the Corporate R&D at RIT program, companies are required to put their own personnel on the project, so the research is a true collaboration. “This is not something they would just toss over the wall to us,” says Donald L. Boyd, the institute’s vice president for research.
Yet these very same limits can make the system a less-than-perfect solution for both partners.
As the University of California at Berkeley’s innovation guru, Henry Chesbrough, was quick to note, the most creative academics tend to be attracted to “inquiry-driven research” rather than projects with narrow goals, so this model might not appeal to the very people industry most needs for breakthroughs.
Mr. Chesbrough prefers a model now being used at Berkeley and a few other institutions, in which companies pony up for more open-ended research projects and then receive nonexclusive rights to the findings, but not ownership. He says that model is more aligned with the mission of a university, although he allows that companies don’t get the same competitive advantage from that program as they do from RIT’s. The Berkeley model is better suited to the kinds of projects that have come to be known as “precompetitive” research.
Still, as he points out, the disconnect between companies and universities is a real problem, one with ramifications for academe and the economy.
So whether it’s the RIT model, the “precompetitive” strategy, or the goofily named TurboNegotiator project that the National Academies is promoting, clearly, change is in the air.
RIT, meanwhile, has no regrets about giving away intellectual property to companies, says Mr. Destler. At least, he says, not yet.
