What I'd like to do now is turn it over
to our first presenter, Dr. Grace Wong.
I've had the pleasure of knowing Grace
for a number of years now.
Grace is Deputy Assistant Director for Engineering
at the National Science Foundation.
She's had that role since 2014.
Prior to that, Grace served two years
as the Division Director of the Division
of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships at NSF.
So I knew you'll have a lot to learn from Grace.
So Grace.
Thank you.
OK, it's a pleasure to be here.
And thank you, Tony, for the introduction.
And let me see if this is working.
So while you're eating lunch, let me tell you a very short story.
Actually, I was thinking about this,
so I found a way.
We're coming here.
Tony and I were talking about the value of IP.
And so I want to actually tell you this example I actually
used many times.
Many of you probably know that the transistor was invented
in 1947.
And Bell Lab announced it in the December of 1947
to the world that there is a little device later on
they call the transistor.
And at the time of that announcement,
it barely generated much excitement
within the Bell Lab or outside of the Bell Lab.
And today, in 2015, when we look back at that invention,
I'm sure you all agree with me that it's arguably
the most impactful technology breakthrough in the 20th century
that practically changed our day-to-day life today.
So what I'm saying here is it's very difficult
to predict the value of an IP, particularly
at the time of invention.
It's really difficult, even with a very, very highly capable
team.
And so today, we're going to start talking about the value
and how do we value the IP?
And in the last 20 to 30 years, if we take a look
at the landscape of the technology,
there's a very clear trend of convergence.
And so to make the case even more complicated
is, and this convergence we're talking about
is a very deep integration of ideas, knowledge, tools,
and techniques, and everything among the physical science,
the engineering, the life sciences,
and also frequently with also social behavior
and economic science.
And to give you a quick example of that
is we all know the NSF started funding Femtol
of the Second Laser in 1980s.
Purely look at the basic research of the physics of that.
And in the 1990s, it's totally by serendipity
you find the application in eye surgery.
And you all know where it is right now.
It's actually widely-adopted by the market today
for the eye surgery and also it's actually
the original for the laser also.
And so if you think about that, with this kind of deep convergence
in the last, if you take a look at that chart,
this is a chart from Journal of Royal Society Interface.
And this is basically studying the USPTO,
how do they come up with the codes for the patent?
And so in a nutshell, if USPTO receive application of patent,
there is no other way they can describe this patent.
They will create a new code for that.
That means it's really new breakthrough.
And if they can use the existing codes
or combination of existing codes to describe that patent,
it's called combination.
If you look at this, and by the way, this is log scale,
you can see in the last 100 years,
this convergent thing is really going.
And it's constantly going that we have much more combination
codes of the patent.
This means our IP landscape is going to continue going on
like this, technology is converging,
and the IP landscape is getting much, much more connected.
And so how do we value the IP in this kind of situation
and continuously and also make sure
that we can really harvest the IP value as a nation
and to enable our economy?
Not only harvest the IP value to benefit one party,
it's really benefit the nation.
And so when we look at this, in the context of university
and industry partnership, in the last 20 or 30 years,
since 1980s, most of the United States research universities
start building the technology transfer office.
And in 2013, Brookings did a study
about the tech transfer office.
You can see 16 universities took 70%
of the total licensing income of the entire US university
system in 2012.
And 87% of the technology transfer office
cannot even break even.
That means they didn't generate enough licensing income
to break even.
And so I'm not saying the tech transfer concept doesn't work,
but clearly, as Tony just said, that's not the only way
to collaborate with industry.
And we clearly, as a community and as a country,
we need to start looking at, how do we
harvest our very abundant intellectual property?
And we need to really seed IP value
from a different perspective.
And I'm sure my fellow panelists is going to expand on this.
So the reason of this really difficult technology transfer
or technology licensing and also create university
industry partnership has a lot to do
with the perception of the IP value.
And when you have different perception,
you have different expectations, we have different expectations.
This misalignment of the interest
make it very difficult to collaborate.
And this is actually the UIDP workshop
supported by National Science Foundation in 2013.
Tony actually organized the workshop.
And in this report, the participants,
actually from all over the country,
and take a look and study this for two days,
and made a conclusion here is universities and industry
need to realistically value the inventions
and explore more flexible policies on IP management.
Because the industry tend to value the IP in the short term
and look at return on investment.
And we need to really see the short term economic benefit.
And for university, our mission is really knowledge creation
and also the education.
So of course, we see the IP from hoping
that we can harvest the IP value in a much longer term.
And so we really need to look at this
and see how we value the IP moving forward.
And in 2014, it was on Tony's list
that he just put in together.
Actually, based on that discussion at the UIDP workshop,
National Science Foundation introduced a new template
for the IP agreement for our industry university
cooperative research centers, which
is really a flagship platform for university and industry
to work together and jointly, cooperatively
define the research agenda.
And IOCRC centers focus on pre-competitive basic research.
And that's why in addition to the traditional option, which
means we clarify, in the partnership,
who owns what IP that's a very traditional approach,
we introduce two other options, which
is open source software.
And another one is public domain operation.
And I want to emphasize the third option here
is particularly beneficial for the pre-competitive research
when we are not into the product development yet,
not into the competitive level yet.
We agree that some of our centers actually
choose to go here within the industry together,
agree to put the inventions and the knowledge
into the public domain, means published.
And so in that case, we don't need
to worry about who owns what, but focusing on the results.
And when we enter the stage of the technology development,
it's close to the competitive research,
then we start talking about the IP right and negotiated IP
right, so save a lot of efforts at the pre-competitive stage
to really work together.
So without taking too much of your time here,
I'm going to close, but just want to say, valued IP,
and how do we harvest IP value moving forward,
and really see the IP value in a new way,
and introduce new thinking is essential for us
to really look at the IP practice as a community
and see how we actually can enable
a much larger economic benefit of the intellectual capacity
for the country, so I'll stop right here.
