By your same logic, why would a researcher devote decades to making an impact in their field? Is it purely altruistic? Is it because they love to see their ar

By your same logic, why would a researcher devote decades to making an impact in their field? Is it purely altruistic? Is it because they love to see their articles cited in journals? Is it because their technologies can be licensed and put into broad use? It's hard to picture a case where we would broadly open a patent for anybody to use at no cost. In cases where that would be the likely outcome, we simply won't bother patenting the technology, and allow it to be published without protection if the researcher so chooses. We are no blindly profit-seeking on behalf of the university, however. We are good partners in negotiation and understand the cases where certain technologies might have immense value to some but won't generate a large amount for the university. We often invest a lot of time and money into technologies that don't necessarily end up making the impact our researchers had hoped. Maybe the tech couldn't be adapted to work at scale or maybe it couldn't pass clinical trials. There are also the cases where we work hard to find partners for orphan drugs. That is a critical area of medicine that in by no means lucrative, but it can make a huge impact to a small population of patients. One success we've had in that area was Myozyme [1]. And not to be pedantic, but since we're on HN, I figured I'd clarify that we really don't fit any accepted definition of bureaucratic [2]. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alglucosidase_alfa http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alglucosidase_alfa 2. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bureaucracy http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bureaucracy