New Pentagon IP chief and unresolved questions

The Pentagon’s new director of intellectual property began work last week focused on standing up a “cadre” of experts who can advise and train defense acquisition teams.

Richard Gray, the new IP chief, comes out of the Defense Department’s Office of the General Counsel, where he was DOD’s sole IP lawyer, according to Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Mike Andrews.

That was from “Pentagon’s new intellectual property chief gets to work” at Inside Defense. HT Jim. Here’s a little more on IP issues from a On DOD with Jared Serbu speaking with Alan Chvotkin at PSC:

The first [pitfall] will be how the DOD assesses the need for intellectual property and what rights it will insist on for each program. I won’t see the individual program office approaches, but contractors tell us all the time that the Department overreaches on their demands for intellectual property just in case they might need it. I think the Army policy… is really trying to get a balance for how much the Department needs, what it will use it for, and when it’s going to need it…

 

Secondly, how much will the Department be willing to pay for that intellectual property. Today, it’s often assumed that it comes along with the development costs. As more and more development is being done in the private sector at private expense, there’s a clear push for the contractors to do more on their own nickle through independent R&D, the balance of ownership and rights to data and how much the government is willing to pay will become important.

I think that second question is really important. How do you price IP, especially at the upfront stages? Jim Hasik is starting to get at that in the GMU white paper series by looking at actual procurement/O&S price differentials for similar systems when bought with technical data rights and when they were not. A slice:

The challenge lies in data collection and cleansing. In my next round of work, to test the value of procuring intellectual property in government procurement auctions, I will construct a hierarchical linear model of US military truck procurement from 1990 through 2019. I will group programs into those in which the government largely purchased the TDRs to the underlying designs of the vehicles its officials chose, and those in which it did not. I will then test for statistical differences in the trajectories of
procurement costs in the ensuing years, to ascertain whether prices changes were materially different under the two treatments. Ideally, I would collect data on parts pricing as well, but these figures could be less available, less complete, and quite difficult to associate with particular truck programs.