BuyBuyLaw

04/08/2016

The ATN is composed of five universities that have been excluded by the group of eight sandstone unis. All very confusing I know, but bear with me.

The ATN have just released their “IP Principles”.

This is an example of the post-enlightenment stupidity that we face in the West.

Let me explain…

The proposed problems that are being solved by the new IP Principles at the ATN universities are:

• Actively promote greater commercialisation of university research by reducing barriers and complexities.
• Increase collaboration between industry partners and researchers from our five members.
• Be responsive to industry needs by ensuring we act in a pragmatic, flexible and agile manner.
• Respect the tight time-frames and unique requirements of individual businesses.
• This means that industry can be reassured they will have a similar engagement experience, based on agreed principles, with a network of leading, technology focussed, universities, right across Australia.

The problem that they are trying to fix is a lack of commercialisation.

But straight up they misdiagnose the cause.

They think it’s because of barriers and complexities at the universities and also due to a lack of efficient collaboration with industry by universities.

Not so o’ boffins.

Generally speaking the lack of commercial activities at your local uni is due to  the fact that:

1. The universities aren’t doing research in the right places for Australian industry
2. Universities and academics don’t get any rewards that are worth having for working with industry
3. Academics are the wrong personality types – any entrepreneurial types are weeded out of the gene pool very early on in the post-graduate process
4. Australian industry on the whole doesn’t want to invest in growth via innovation, even if they get the innovation for free

So, a lack of rational thought processes has led the ATN unis to misdiagnose the causes of the so-called problem. By the way, it’s only a problem because nuisance sections of the media keep calling it one.

The ATN unis have developed some new principles to solve the misdiagnosed problems:

“The ATN universities’ approach to managing intellectual property is based on the following principles:

1. We actively encourage students and staff to undertake research that is relevant to challenges faced by society and in partnership with industry, government and community groups.

2. As guided by our industry partners, we encourage them to own and take the lead in commercialisation of intellectual property generated from industry funded research when they are best placed to do so.

3.  Where access to university owned or jointly owned IP is necessary or beneficial for commercialisation we support access to the IP based on fair and equitable terms, in a timely manner.

4. Our interactions with industry will be governed by a transparent, flexible and user-friendly system that supports and encourages engagement using a range of IP models.

5. Each university will make public our Intellectual Property Policies and Standard Commercial Agreement templates, to provide a simple and transparent framework.

6. We actively encourage and promote an entrepreneurial culture for our staff and students. This includes a system of support to facilitate the creation of new ventures where our staff and students are appropriately involved.

7. All partnerships and resultant commercial agreements will be developed and negotiated in a prompt manner and in keeping with these core principles.”

The best thing about this is that the universities probably won’t do anything about these ‘principles’.

They won’t change any of their by-laws to reflect these principles. They will just use what they have and make the argument, that no one will really listen to, that their current by-laws are consistent with the principles.

That is, the whole thing is an exercise in self-deluded marketing, in the great tradition of all all such exercises in modern Club Australia.

Just as an aside, they should introduce these changes:

1. We only hire academics that are proven entrepreneurs as well as subject matter experts and excellent educators (aka the unicorns that MIT hire)
2. We will let academics and students own their own IP and commercialise it without reference to the university
3. We will mostly ignore all Australian oligarchical companies and not collaborate with the fuckers
4. We will remove as much of the upper and middle management in the university as possible and return to levels that were seen in the 60’s where academic schools pretty much ran themselves as independent entities