Take Back Control

It’s not rocket science, but we get more innovation when researchers have more control over their work.As Stuart Buck from The Good Science Project argues for the US, and we argued in Academic to Entrepreneur for the UK, numerous empirical studies show that we should give direct rights to patent and exploit discoveries and inventions to the researchers and inventors responsible, rather than handing these rights over to the universities that employ them.Take recent Nobel winner Katalin Karikó. She was driven out of academia over a decade ago due to the unpopularity of her work on mRNA – the same discoveries that allowed us to weather the pandemic. Nevertheless, the University of Pennsylvania, which repeatedly demoted her and eventually drove her out, is now making $1.2 billion in royalties from patents on her work – significantly more royalties than any other university in the world.Buck runs through a lot of the evidence that we also cited in our report. To some extent, the Government-commissioned independent review into spinouts listened to us and others making the case that things aren’t working for spinout founders. But while we expected to be outliers in wanting a return to Professors’ Privilege – which gives academics ownership of the intellectual property they create – until we see evidence to the contrary, we’ll keep making the case for a return to a system that gives power back to innovators.

From my Friday Newsletter.