Absolutely not. Do I hope that they produce a certain amount of revenue for the university? Yes. Do we do it for money? No. But, sure it’d be great to have it self-sustaining. Will it be self-sustaining? I don’t know. But it’d be great. And would I like to subsidize it? Absolutely. I’d like to subsidize everything. I’d like to have tuition free. I’d like to let everybody into the football games free. I’d love to do all that, but it’s a question of where the money comes from, and this is just one of a large number of university priorities, and where we can find sources of revenue to pay for important, useful things, we will look for it, and we’ll do it.
But whatever happens with respect to the amount of money made through the commercialization process, we are not going to let these services go away.
X: The commercialization committee also addressed this tension between IP licensing revenue and the broader goals of technology transfer—diffusion of knowledge and university innovation, and the contribution to economic development—suggesting that the C4C was prioritizing the former.
MY: I think we need to have a more nuanced view, and maybe an industry-specific view of what appropriate licensing levels are and equity positions and so forth. It is important to get something, because the investigator—again, to some degree, isn’t doing it for the money—but you have to create some incentive for the department to allow them to do it.
We’re providing a lot of services. I would be delighted if somebody would come in and pay for all those services, but I’m still kind of waiting for somebody to come do that. So, I think getting the balance right is critical. Whether we’ve got the balance right or not, I’m not 100 percent sure.
My instinct, and I’m a country lawyer—if I were any good at this, I’d be running C4C instead of doing this job—but my instinct is our licensing fees are probably in the ballpark. Our equity requests are probably in the ballpark. Maybe our anti-dilution clause, maybe we’ve got to look at.
The other thing to remember is there’s always a tradeoff between equity and licensing fees. One of the things I’ve stressed is that a big goal is to get it out the door. And venture capital is tight in this community as it is everywhere, and in fact the venture capitalists are moving much more downstream because they are very big now and so they’re not investing in smaller stages they used to. The angel investors, therefore, have moved there. So this kind of period between conception and angel investors has widened. So getting this stuff out the door is harder than it used to be in some cases. That’s in part why the W Fund is important.
X: The committee also raised concerns about potential conflicts of interest—that the people responsible for setting commercialization policy were also responsible for implementing it. Was that a concern that resonated with you when you read the committee’s report?
MY: Not really, because it turns out, I happen to run the university. I don’t pound the table and I’m not autocratic and I’m not a tyrant, and people sometimes forget that I actually get my way most of the time.
[With] the change that was occurring during the period of that report, I think they’re right. I think there was some panic in C4C about what would happen when the Hall patents expired.
And, No. 2, Linden [Rhoads] and many of her staff are actually VCs. And lo and behold, you put somebody who’s a VC across the table from another VC and they both want the most amount of money. It took some time to say, ‘Yeah, look, let’s get our fair share, but no more. Let’s get it out the door. If that means taking a little less, if that means back-loading [licensing fees], that’s fine. Let’s get it out the door.’
I think the increase in the number of companies over time has been an indication that that’s beginning to catch on and be felt. I don’t see myself as un-influential in running C4C.
Where I do think we have an opportunity to do something, which is referenced in the report, is really getting a much more robust platform around the entire university for students to get involved.
Right now, all the students were involved often in the labs and things like that. But I want to create an opportunity for every school around the university to have the resources: if they want to run innovation classes and entrepreneurial-oriented classes or curricula, if they want to have competitions, if they want to have ways in which business students link with engineering students, link with law students, link with students from the college of environment—I want to create resources that help that happen seamlessly, so the students become much more the centerpiece of this.
I think, in the end, it will actually help get stuff out the door. Things that are powerful at a university are things that are really anchored in the core values of the university, and of course, our first and foremost core value is learning. And so creating more ways in which C4C and the entire entrepreneurial, innovation, commercialization world can be a central part of the instructional component of the university—that’s what Vikram [Jandhyala]’s job is. It’s not coincidental that he’s an academic. That’s, I think, kind of our next step.
X: Another avenue for technology transfer is allowing faculty to have joint positions in industry and at the university. I know at least one example of it happening here already. Do you support this as a more formalized policy?
MY: I really do. It’s tricky because on the one hand there are things here that need to be done. I can’t just let my professors say, OK, you’re a full-time professor and here’s your salary, but you don’t have to teach any classes when you’re researching over there, and you don’t have any labs or any students. Obviously, that doesn’t make any sense, on the one hand. On the other hand, there are a lot of opportunities for our faculty to have more seamless transitions in and out of the private sector—and both ways. Professors from practice as it were, coming here, parking for a year or two in between major projects. Frankly, younger professors like it. I think we’ll lose professors if we don’t have a more seamless way of doing that.
It’s an interesting set of ideas and we very much will be wrestling with those issues now in the next year or two. A lot’s going on already.
X: What are some of your goals for commercialization in the next three years?
MY: I’m afraid to tell them to double again in three years because they’ll do it next year. My biggest goal is to build on what we’ve done, take into account things that we’ve discovered that seem to be working really well, things that we can really drill down on and make better, and then, add into that a real expansion of the way in which this is connected to serve the academic learning mission. If three years from now we’ve got 6,000 students involved in innovation curricula and [business plan] competitions and things like that, I will consider this an extraordinary success.
