Academic leaders are responsible for obtaining value from innovations developed at a university. Importantly, innovation value can vanish when there is an inadvertent disclosure of an invention. A hallmark requirement for patent protection is an invention’s novelty. Many countries have absolute novelty requirements. What happens if a discovery is published or otherwise disclosed before a patent application is filed, and the so-called cat is out of the bag? What value can the university salvage?
Beyond the Credential Factory: Why Higher Education Must Shift from Management to Flourishing
For decades, higher education leadership has obsessed over “student success” as a purely operational metric. We track retention and graduation rates and postgraduation outcomes with the same linear precision that
Yoshitaka Iwasaki
August 3, 2026
