We bring you a thought provoking guest post on the complex issue of financing University research from Dr Roya Ghafele, an Oxford academic.
This issue did crop up, albeit incidentally, during our discussions on the controversial Indian “Bayh Dole” bill, a bill that appears to have turned a bit reclusive of late.
Roya holds a Lectureship in international political economy with the University of Oxford. Prior to her assignment at Oxford, she was an International Research Scholar at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley.
From 2002 to 2007 she worked as an Economist with the United Nation’s World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In this role she offered strategic advice on Intellectual Property, Trade and Innovation to Governments in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. In 2000 she started her career with the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she moved from a five year long experience as a ballet dancer.
Dr. Ghafele was trained at Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, the Sorbonne and Vienna University. Her Ph.D. on ‘Globalization, Francophone Africa and the WTO’ was awarded the Theodor Koerner Research Prize by the President of the Republic of Austria. During the course of her studies she was four times awarded the Vienna University Grant for Excellence in Studies. She is fluent in German, English, French, Italian and Persian.
This guest post is a bit different in that it links directly to Roya’s powerpoint presentation, where she highlights the key issues and her core thesis. For the convenience of our readers, we provide a summary below:
Dr Ghafele begins by assessing current best practices of financing university research. She then goes on to advocate what she describes as the ‘third way’, after which, she suggests ways in which to assess the impact of this novel approach.
She posits that the best practices of various universities, such as U.C. Berkeley, MIT, Oxford or Chalmers School of Technology demonstrates that best performers focus on similar themes, such as the promotion of an entrepreneurial culture at university, as well the generation of turnover from royalties and licensing fees.
Drawing from current practices, Dr. Ghafele goes on to suggest a more evolved approach, which she calls the ‘third way.’ The ‘Third way’ focuses on systemic change, rather than on single stakeholder intervention. It reflects a third generation of innovation policies that focuses on training, awareness raising and the leveraging of cluster effects, rather than the development of physical infrastructure (i.e. science parks).
This is a unique approach that outperforms existing best practice in many ways; i.e. it focuses on the leverage of network effects among the various academic institutions, rather than repeating the traditional ‘one university – one commercialization’ approach. The ‘Third Way’ also outperforms existing best practices by adopting latest trends in IP management , such as online trading, perceiving IP as financial asset, leveraging open innovation for improving patent quality. Organizational values, structures & procedures of various actors (business, academia, government) are recognized and different institutional cultures are sought to be overcome through boundary spanning.
The competing demands and interests of business & academia are reflected through the introduction of a ‘socially responsible university research commercialization’, as currently undertaken by U.C. Berkeley. For a more elaborate discussion of her novel idea, see here.
