Love and Hate in University Technology Transfer: Examining Faculty vs. Staff Conflicts and Ethics

What is it about?

This research is about university technology transfer which is the transfer of research for university faculty’s research lab into the marketplace with the help of tech transfer office (TTO) staff. This research is about the relationships between the faculty and TTO staff with regard to technology commercialization, intellectual property licensing, the protection of intellectual property rights (IPR), trust, organization values, job insecurity, uncertainty, conflicts, personal values, ethics, and scientific misconduct. With respect to university technology transfer, the purpose of this paper is to examine the literature focused on the relationship between university research faculty and technology transfer office staff. We attempt to provide greater understanding of how research faculty’s personal values and research universities’ organization values may differ and why. Faculty researchers and tech transfer office (TTO) staff are perceived to be virtuous agents. When both are meeting each other’s needs, a “love” relationship exists. However, when these needs are not met, a “hate” relationship exists that is replete with doubt and uncertainty. This doubt and uncertainty creates tension and subsequent conflicts. There are many accounts where faculty researchers have not followed university policies and expectations, often violating policy and ethical standards. Likewise, faculty report numerous examples of how TTO staff members’ negligence in servicing their attempts to be good institutional citizens have failed them. This paper explores this love/hate relationship and reveals numerous conflicts that call into question ethical concerns. It also provides a set of recommendations for reducing and potentially alleviating these concerns. Literature review. Results from a thorough review of the literature on the relationship between faculty and university TTOs reveals that perceived job insecurity is the primary reason that some research faculty members as well as some TTO staff, unethically violate their university policy to disclose invention disclosures and select to not provide full services, respectively. One way to alleviate the conflict between faculty’s personal values regarding their inventions and university’s organizational values is to enact measures that build trust and reduce insecurity among faculty members and TTO staff. In this paper, we not only examine this faculty/ TTO staff ethical conflicts, but we offer a set of recommendations that we believe will reduce the likelihood of unethical behavior while encouraging greater institutional commitment and trust.

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Why is it important?

This review reveals there are several reasons that research faculty and TTO staff unethically violate university policies or otherwise hinder the university tech transfer process. We propose that feelings of job insecurity cause distress in both the faculty researchers and tech transfer staff. Eleven recommendations are offered along with those recommendations that appear in the literature. It is hoped that these recommendations will help resolve specific tensions that result in unethical conflicts. While we provided this set of specific recommendations, our overall recommendation is that faculty researchers and TTO staff need to be enlightened with training and robust engagement. Improved communication, information sharing, and relationship building is required to alleviate the felt tensions between the faculty researchers and TTO staff. In fact, ethical awareness and behaviors can be taught early, continually and frequently. Furthermore, faculty and TTO staff can be trained in aspects and tool of collaborative communication (Peters & Schumann, 2016) to facilitate more constructive dialogue. Ethics governing faculty researchers’ responsibility is not taught in most doctoral programs (Austin, 2003).

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