Richard Liman posted a parable about cross-university collaboration. We thought it illustrates the value of multi-organizational research collaboration and are reproducing it here with Richard’s permission.
“There is an old scientist named Henry. He worked in a dimly lit laboratory in the basement of a classroom building at a well known university in a college town in New England. He has been researching a major breakthrough for 11 years. After many long disappointing nights, he finally has tangible results.
A few years before this major discovery, Angela, a young German graduate student, starts her PhD thesis at a new university in a city an hour from Munich. She comes up with the same concept as Henry. She did not know about his work. She was thinking about the same problem and reaches the same answers. She is not the only one.
A precocious undergraduate in Buenos Aires named Carlos was also thinking about the problem. Carlos gets his PhD and publishes many articles in his native Spanish on this research. While in school he works as a desk clerk at the Intercontinental. A U.S. patent lawyer who stays at the hotel tells him about a website (http://www.gain-online.org ). On it are recently published patent applications filed by universities. The applications often show research before he reads about it in peer reviewed journals. Carlos went to this site often.
One day he sees two U.S. patent applications: one for Henry’s research and one for Angela’s work. He went to the patent lawyer’s URL and found this link: http://www.litmanlaw.com/Rule-99-Prior-Art-Submissions-in-Published-Applications .
Carlos had not applied for a patent. This is unfortunate because he is the first to develop this highly valuable technology. It could have changed his life and given him the recognition and money to have the research career he dreamed about while sitting at the hotel desk.
Angela and Henry never knew about Carlos, but as a result of having the patent lawyer submit his articles within the two month deadline as prior art in their applications, there is a happy ending. Both want to collaborate with him to further develop the technology. The three work together. The synergy of their combined thinking results in a very valuable patent portfolio shared by three universities receiving funding from licensing royalties paid by a global company”.
Richard’s parable uses a patent attorney’s web site as the catalyst that induced collaboration but the parable would hold true for any other catalyst. For example, a colleague of Carlos may become aware of Henry and Angela’s work and suggest Carlos contacted them or the three might have met at a scientific meeting and realized the synergy between their work. The point is the power of the three working together is greater than the sum of their individual contributions. The end result more than compensates for the effort of seeking out collaborators and forging collaborations.
