Nuanced Management of IP Rights: Shaping Industry-University Relationships to Promote Social Impact

Abstract

Multiple and diverse intellectual property management strategies are required to deploy university research results for maximal social impact and accessibility. University technology transfer offices have traditionally been judged by the number of patents they hold, the number of licensed signed, startup company data, and license revenues. Universities, however, perform early-stage research and serve to accelerate innovation; they are lead-off runners in a multi-party relay race to commercial endpoints. New definitions of success in the industry contracting office at the University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley) have engendered new models of industry-university contracting including those that benefit the developing world, such as our Socially Responsible Licensing Program. Industry partnerships are indispensable to the achievement of our goals and our approach to industry contracting is relationship-based. Universities and companies interact in myriad ways and for many different reasons. Based on a range of needs and desired outcomes in campus interactions with industry, we continually draft new contract types to implement a broad spectrum of intellectual property (IP) management strategies. To assess the impact of our strategies a combination of traditional and non-traditional metrics must be employed. New metrics to measure social impact rely in part, on external data that are outside of the purview of our office, and in part, on outcomes and externalities that occur over many years.

Keywords: Socially Responsible Licensing, social impact, innovation acceleration, technology transfer, intellectual property, technology licensing, public policy, neglected diseases, entrepreneurship, public goods, property rights, equitable access, valuation, metrics

JEL Classification: L20, L21, L22, L30, L31, L32, L33, L39, H41, H43