Connected, cascading and open - letting intellectual property and innovations flow out via a range of outlets

If, like other virtual ventures and collaborative exercises, it is possible to reduce or outsource much of the coordination and planning cost involved in our practice, then why not simply open the gates to as much IP as possible?

For example:

• If we could cascade this IP through a series of models for exploiting or transferring IP, from the 'Rolls-Royce' internal or venture capital (VC) partnered model, on one end of the spectrum, through to the assignment of IP to collaborators or academics on the other end of the spectrum, why not relax the process?
• If we could fail early, or at least cheaply, and with a greater range of propositions, why be so precious as to what ventures are allowed to proceed and those that are not?
• If we realise that it is not the university's role to try to run these ventures and that it could never do so effectively, why limit the creation of such ventures?

Chris Anderson's Long Tail is a good analogy here. Previously any bricks and mortar business could only justify dealing with the most profitable of product or service lines. That made sense in the old economy. In the new digital economy, as Amazon or eBay could testify, that self-constriction makes no sense.

Within the long tail for university ventures may lie:

• Knowledge Based businesses (no, or little IP)
• Template Licence deals (ie low value non-exclusive deals which can be dealt with via standard terms and conditions)
• Lower Value propositions (that are still profitable)

It's not clear that the bureaucracy that universities commonly expend on culling any potential venture that crossed the red line into the orange tail ever made sense. Now, in the model digital economy it's clear that it does not make sense:

• As it has already been noted, nothing is commoditised in the knowledge transfer (KT) process, there is no advantage to focusing on the hits or popular products to gain Walmart-style economies of scale
• It's too early to know which opportunities are hits and which are not, and the university has little direct access to those markets anyway
• The revenue model for UK universities (like many other publicly supplemented education systems) is much more complex and dependent on many indirect streams of income. Some very significant income streams, indeed more significant than the direct commercial streams, are based on impact metrics. The Research Council and HEFCE all measure and reward impact
• Many of the long tail, apparently 'smaller', propositions may actually require less investment expenditure, so result in less dilution and low costs so resulting in better margins in ROI. Certainly the odds of some of these returning value to the University are increased as the spread is increased - this is a basic tenet of VC or angel investment. The level of uncertainty makes that separation of blockbusters from the rest too difficult

So it is no longer vital to focus the selection process on eliminating the long tail. Rather it is now possible to develop a range of processes that free-up the potential in this long tail. Only if our organisations are operating via an old, investment and risk heavy model of KT does such a heavy stage-gate process make sense. The objective, rather, should be to accept that individual ventures are inherently risky, but that the risk in the process of company creation is the primary concern. This process risk can be more directly controlled than the chances of controlling the risk in any single venture could ever be. The biggest control in this respect is:

• to outsource the investment of time and cash as much as possible
• to isolate the liability of the university for any business failure or activity from which it wishes not to be associated
• to focus on the overall portfolio and not the opportunity loss in individual project performance

If this can be achieved then the outcome is nearly all upside for the university with little downside.

Related to the strategy of designing in some degree of flexibility into the technology transfer process, is allowing for multiple routes for the flow of intellectual property (IP). This is not incompatible with adopting a primary model, and may involve the determination of a range of fallback or secondary and tertiary routes for the flow of IP. Using the example of the long tail analogy, it may be possible to negotiate a deal with a VC-backed intermediary to address some of the more complex and demanding ventures that reside at the top of the curve, and to use the more free-form KT 2.0 approach for the bulk of the middle, and more radically open strategies at the tail.

Whilst not exclusively for tail-type projects, the use of online IP market places, like IP Net etc, allow for opportunities for IP to increase the likelihood of an end-user, and are worth factoring into the cascading approach. As the opportunities reach the end of the tail, it would be worthwhile considering either handing the opportunity over to the inventor or creating a team which are free of constraints and ownership. An alternative approach, which the University of Glasgow has experimented with, is to grant free rights to IP to commercial partners through the Easy Access IP scheme. Placing a backstop date on the period in which the primary transfer channels can be used is a useful way to expedite IP transfer and significantly increase impact.

In summary, if someone else is prepared to devote energy and resource to exploiting IP that would otherwise sit on the shelf (possibly costing patent fees), what is to be lost in letting them have a go?