The UC Regents Special Commitee on Innovation Transfer and Entrepreneurship met on August 28th. Below is a summary of the meeting from the Daily Cal:
On Monday, the University of California Board of Regents had their final special committee meeting on Innovation Transfer and Entrepreneurship. According to the university website, the Innovation Transfer and Entrepreneurship, or I&E, program “moves groundbreaking research and discovery from the lab and classroom into the marketplace by nurturing great ideas and people, and by investing in bold solutions to today’s biggest challenges.”
Hosted at UC Santa Cruz, the meeting began with a presentation particularly about the progress UCSC has made in I&E. After originally approaching the university in 2019, the committee began implementing recommendations made by the Regents Working Group on Innovation Transfer and Entrepreneurship that were developed in 2021. Of the 14 suggestions, half are now complete or set to be completed soon. The 14 items were focused in seven categories: governance, policy, patent tracking system, funding, culture/reputation, enforcement and performance metrics. Updates on some of the recommendations since April 2023 were given by university provost of academic affairs Katherine Newman, chair of the Board of Regents Richard Leib and executive director of research and innovation Deborah Motton.
Action items that required updates included a patent tracking system, revising presidential policies on equity and patents, guidance on conflicts of interest in licensing and proof of concept funding. The presidential patent policy has not been updated since 1997 and is set to be revised by 2024. Conflict of interest guidance was previously long and confusing, according to Motton, and is now clear and condensed. Another presentation was conducted by Damon Tull, director for industry alliances at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management, on a subsect of I&E, referred to as I2E2, Inclusive Innovation and Equitable Entrepreneurship.
To explain why I2E2’s aim of creating “a more inclusive and equitable innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem in support of state and national needs” is so vital, especially in California, Tull collected and examined data that he presented for the regents. “Our peers are missing,” Tull said, pointing out that only around 6% of venture capital in total is invested in Latine, female and Black founders. These are groups that make up 46.7% of the science and engineering workforce. Had those peers been included in the field and racial bias been addressed 20 years prior, the U.S. GDP would have seen an additional $16 trillion added, according to Tull. Notably, California would be the third largest global market in the world, Tull explained.
In the vein of I&E, a roadmap for a potential university library AI program was presented by Todd Grappone, a librarian at UCLA. Grappone argued that the university should be among the first to invest in the AI initiative and not left on the “sidelines.” Employing AI and machine learning to university libraries will make knowledge available to a greater population and advance library operations, Grappone added.
As always, we preserve the recordings of Regents meetings since the Regents have no policy on duration of preservation. The overall website for this meeting is at:
https://archive.org/details/regents-public-comment-survivors-health-insurance-8-28-23.
Morning session at:
Afternoon session at:
Yours truly in public comments on halting cancellation of survivors' health insurance:
No comments:
Post a Comment