Since the middle of February 2016, Fred Reinhart (left) is now the immediate past president of the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM). I recently had the opportunity to go on the record with Reinhart as he was winding down his tenure as president of AUTM.

During Reinhart’s year as President, much changed at AUTM. There was a concerted effort to transition to a a strategic board of directors that would result in more dynamic member engagement, AUTM hired a full-time Executive Director, the organization spent a great deal of time developing more effective relationships with industry, AUTM bolstered its relationships with key university organizations, and AUTM began more earnestly working on international initiatives. While more progress was made in some areas than in others, progress has been achieved across the board. All-in-all, Reinhart’s tenure at the helm of AUTM was quite successful and he has helped focus the organization on the challenges that lie ahead as he hands the reins to new president David Winwood.

What follows are excerpts from my in-depth conversation with Reinhart. To read the full transcript, please see Exit Interview: A Conversation with Outgoing AUTM President Fred Reinhart.

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Here is what Reinhart had to say about the media believing that, since several universities have won high-profile patent litigation verdicts recently, every university will want to get in on :the gravy train.”

REINHART: Now that WARF and Carnegie Mellon have won lawsuits that resulted in multi-million dollar damages, I get a call from a media reporter in California just the week after the WARF-Apple ruling and the question was, “Well, now that WARF has made all this money, I suppose a lot of universities are going to jump into this litigation game.” And it’s such an absurd statement because nothing could be further from the truth.

QUINN: Well, explain that. Because I know that to be true, you know that to be true, but why is that?

REINHART: Well, there are several reasons. First, there seems to be a sense that universities have an incentive to litigate. Why do we file patent applications? We don’t file patent applications to get rich. We don’t file patent applications for any reason other than our licensees want something — they want an asset; they want, you know, a protected time period to justify the investment they’re going to make in creating a product or a service. So we only file patent applications because of the market — there’s a market out there for them. We don’t like litigation. There’s nothing great about it. We‘re not set up to engage in it. It’s expensive. It’s time-consuming, distracting and it doesn’t look good for anybody to be involved with litigation, and I guess the key point is that when a university has a patent — what it most wants to do is not litigate but to license that patent and transfer the rights to a commercial entity that will use that technology and develop it. So, our first goal is to license, not litigate. Secondly, we — why would you bite the hand that feeds you? If a university has a reputation that is litigious, that university’s partners are companies, they hire our graduates, they sponsor research, they donate and endow chairs of research. We just don’t want to get into fights with these companies, so litigation is really a last resort and even getting the permission to litigate is a huge deal at all universities. So it is not that common, and people who say it is are not correct– they’re massaging the numbers to make a false case.

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In this next segment Reinhart bursts the myth that universities are standing in the way of global health objectives.

REINHART:The other thing that we’re hearing is that — and this is incredible to me — that university patents are standing in the way of improving global health in poorer countries, which is so uninformed because we don’t file patent applications in developing countries very often. We actually have a principle that we’ve endorsed at both universities and AUTM and we have a whole toolkit of licensing terms that address global health and our principle is to not stand in the way of that or collect royalties on sales in developing countries. And then we still get people saying that patents are hindering the free exchange of scientific information, which has been disproven over and over. Or they say that patents are simply a tax that people are forced to pay. I doubt if 6,900 agreements would have been concluded last year if patents were just a tax. The latest thing from Brookings, which I really feel is terribly uninformed, is that patents are just a defense – that the main reason people license patents is because they’re a defense against infringement. They claim that is the only reason.

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Finally, Reinhart discussed what AUTM does in order to keep track of the good that university technology does for the economy and for people.

REINHART: And I think AUTM has had a good two-pronged strategy. We’re collecting quantitative data and facts and have our annual Licensing Activity Survey, which is an incredible resource to look at and you can analyze many years of longitudinal data and come up with all kinds of interesting analyses. So we hit the quantitative pretty well. We’ve got the quantitative down, but the qualitative is actually the most important, and the way we’ve handled that is with our incredible Better World Report, which just hit 500 stories. And if you don’t like numbers or you want evidence that university tech transfer makes a better world, just look at those stories in the Better World Report, because they’re heartwarming, you know, they’re just inspiring and it just amazes me that people, I mean, some of the critics tend to just overlook that. I don’t know what they are after— they’re just discounting it for some strange reason. I guess it doesn’t fit the narrative that they wish to impose on everybody.

Tags: Association of University Technology Managers, AUTM, Fred Reinhart, interview, interviews

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