Xconomy: Harvard’s Verdine Blazing Trail for Scientific Entrepreneurs
Summary
X: What you’re doing sounds like a career pathway that could be used in lots of other academic centers, not just Harvard, that have that same 20 percent time limit.The classic problem is that the university wants to drive a hard bargain, make sure it’s not getting fleeced, maybe doesn’t understand all the development work that needs to be done by industry.Art Levinson, when he was at Genentech, made a deal with the University of California to have a uniform intellectual property agreement.What happened is, because of that universal IP agreement, there was a flood of collaboration between Genentech and the UC schools.I can’t tell you how many people at Harvard, myself included, have had grants terminated that were 25 years running, that were highly productive.