Blue Biofuels Inc (BIOF)

[LTE]

<< Does the University of Central Florida's involvement have any influence on your opinions? This is a very credible higher education institution. This gives me pause to walking away from this deal.>>

Sure - I think that they're struggling to recoup anything they can.
That's because most university research departments lose money
UNLESS they're MIT, Stanford, etc.:

Patenting University Research Has Been A Dismal Failure, Enabling Patent Trolling. It's Time To Stop


For many years we've been incredibly critical of the famous Bayh-Dole Act, which was passed in 1980 with the idea that it would encourage greater innovation by pushing universities to patent the research they were doing. The theory -- based on a rather ignorant view of innovation and research -- was that patents would create a market, which, in turn, would enable easier knowledge transfer from academia to industry, leading to a research boom. The actual results have been a near total disaster. What's actually happened are two very bad things. First, it's seriously harmed university research, by guaranteeing much less information sharing between researchers. And, it turns out, that information sharing is a big part of how innovation and big scientific breakthroughs occur. Not surprisingly (if you understand basic economics), when you try to lock up each idea with a patent, researchers (and, more importantly, their administrator bosses), suddenly don't want to share any more. The end result? Lots of important research stifled. What a shame.

The second massive problem in the wake of the Bayh-Dole Act was that every university stupidly thought that it would help make them rich. They bought into the myth of patents and this idea of "tech transfer," and pretty much every research university set up a "tech transfer" office, whose main job was to try to "license" those patents for as much money as possible. University administrators started licking their chops at this potential profit center. But, over the past couple decades, reality has set in. As we've noted for years, ideas are a very, very small piece of the puzzle for innovation. It's the execution that matters. But the folks working in tech transfer offices never understood that and have tried to put ridiculously high prices on their patents, in an attempt to justify their own existence. End result? The exact opposite of the stated goal of the Bayh-Dole Act: less research got transfered into industry, because various tech transfer offices priced it out of the market.

We've pointed out in the past that this expected "profit center" has been a disaster for nearly every university that tried it. With only a handful of exceptions (Stanford, MIT, etc.)....

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131122/01322825335/patenting-university-research-has-been-dismal-failure-enabling-patent-trolling-its-time-to-stop.shtml