Institutional ownership of intellectual property can stifle a clinician's motivation to commercialize their idea. Dr. Adam Power advocates for an 'inventor-owned' IP model, arguing that no university department or tech transfer office will ever match the round-the-clock drive of the inventor themself.
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The most powerful incentive for increasing employee ownership is to make founder exits to their employees tax-free. This aligns financial self-interest with a social good, making it more profitable for a founder to sell to their team than to private equity.
Despite being seen as innovation hubs, universities face identical organizational barriers as large corporations. Academics report that internal power structures, cultural inertia, and siloed departments create bottlenecks that prevent them from effectively commercializing novel IP, mirroring corporate struggles.
Oshkosh structures partnerships to own IP developed jointly with a startup, then licenses it back. This approach, outlined in the initial NDA, gives the large corporation control over patent defense while providing the startup with usage rights, often with market-specific limitations.
Dan Schmitt used his role as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Northwestern University to gain priority access to new technologies. This strategic position allowed him to secure the foundational asset for Actuate Therapeutics, directly bridging academic innovation with commercial enterprise.
Traditional academic promotion criteria, which prioritize publications, disincentivize clinicians from pursuing innovation. Dr. Power argues that for universities to truly support medical invention, they must update their standards to grant patents and industry consulting equivalent academic weight to research papers.
In MedTech, the regulatory environment neutralizes a startup's key advantage: speed. Intellectual property becomes the critical defense, protecting the company's innovation from larger competitors while it navigates the mandatory, slow-moving approval process required for market entry.
The unique treatment protocols of well-known doctors like Peter Attia are a form of intellectual property. These could be licensed and scaled through AI agents, allowing regular doctors to implement specialized, evidence-adjacent care plans without patients needing to see the expert directly.
Reframe IP from a legal asset to be protected into your 'intellectual perspective'—a unique viewpoint on how to do something. This mindset shifts focus from costly legal protection to creating shareable, repeatable frameworks that scale your business beyond your personal involvement.
Dr. Saav Solanki observes that many breakthrough medicines don't follow a linear path within one organization. Instead, they are developed collaboratively, often starting in a university lab, moving to a small biotech for initial development, and finally being acquired or licensed by a large pharma company for commercialization.
Large medical device companies have rigid innovation cycles that may not align with a clinician's new idea. Dr. Adam Power discovered that to ensure his invention would actually reach patients, he had to commercialize it himself rather than waiting for a large company's timeline.