Curiosity-Driven Research and University Technology Transfer

Katherine J. Strandburg, DePaul University College of Law

Abstract

The rise in university patenting has provoked concerns about the effects that increasing university entanglements with the marketplace might have on the long-term health of the basic research enterprise. The debate has been framed primarily in terms of a distinction between commercial, proprietary research and university “open science.” The alternatives are too often limited to either technology transfer through patenting or a return to the traditional university research paradigm in which results are simply dumped into the public domain for foraging by commercial actors. These alternatives are too constrained. This Article views technology transfer as a species of “cross-cultural” trade among knowledge-production systems with distinctive economic and social practices that correspond to differing values and goals. Increasingly, studies by innovation policy researchers, along with the practical experience of university researchers and technology transfer officials, highlight the fact that knowledge moves from universities to industrial entities via a variety of channels and paths. The “cross-cultural” trade of technology transfer has the potential to reshape these knowledge-production systems. Legal constructs, such as patents, may play very different roles in these different contexts and it is appropriate to be concerned about the unpredictable results of grafting mechanisms developed in one system on to another. Nonetheless, the solution is not scientific isolationism. The very existence of the university research enterprise is predicated on its eventual benefits to society. The goal must be to devise technology transfer mechanisms that will be minimally disruptive to the ability of university research to fulfill its purpose -- the production of knowledge that would not be produced by the private market. There are in fact three analytically distinct knowledge production systems for technical knowledge: commercial research and development, “targeted” publicly funded research, and curiosity-driven research. These three systems differ in their primary venues of operation and the subject matter of the research, but I argue here that the principal distinction between them is that each addresses a different problem in matching the supply of innovation and allocation of innovative effort to the socially optimal demand. Curiosity-driven research, in particular, appears to be the best available means to compensate for the fact that both market and political mechanisms fail to provide socially optimal investment in the production of knowledge with unpredictable, long term, and widely-dispersed social benefits. Curiosity-driven research is performed by a social network of researchers organized according to social norms that derive from the individual preferences of the participants. A model of these individual preferences is used to explore how particular efforts to transfer knowledge between production systems, including patenting, are likely to impact the functioning of the curiosity-driven research system. The analysis suggests that, under current law, patenting is likely to be an ineffective and potentially detrimental means to transfer knowledge from the curiosity-driven system to the commercial research and development system. The Article concludes by suggesting how changes to the patent law, along with an emphasis on other mechanisms for knowledge transfer, might better accomplish both the preservation of the curiosity-driven knowledge production system and the social absorption of the knowledge it produces.