Group items tagged

the people of the United States spent an average of nearly $40 billion every year supporting institutional research

65 percent of invention disclosure bundles remain, on average, unlicensed and unused … each year.

”…the street finds its own uses for things.”

most of the IP (much of which we paid for) isn’t actually on the street, where entrepreneurial folks can do something with it.

the overworked and understaffed tech transfer offices

their models

There’s not necessarily room for exploration and discovery

byzantine bureaucracy of large organizations

But let’s face it, there’s also the hoarding and the overprotecting

So much IP is generated that it’s far too much for any one entity to ever make sense of

very few people are aware of — let alone able to access — an invention outside the social circle of its inventors, the scientific community involved, or even the “crowd” that’s sometimes harnessed in open innovation

we need new ways of democratizing it

idea contests

marketplaces

competitions to find uses for on-the-shelf IP

missing out on the transformative potential of what technology can do here

promoting new ways of interacting around intellectual property

This turns off the average entrepreneur, who doesn’t have the patience and bandwidth to engage in all the unnecessary overhead of searching, browsing, and licensing IP.

Another missing piece is ways of allowing the crowd to interact with each other and decide which technologies should be licensed

Most of the examples I listed above haven’t changed much over the past decade or broken into the mainstream.

why not a Kickstarter for IP?

Such a website would bring together not just funds and transactions, but communities — with their attendant feedback mechanisms — that are interested in creating something novel around unused patents.

such a model would help get the ideas of a few into the minds of many.

open up the currently closed shelf to virtual browsing

inventions are not only ‘filed’ or ‘granted’ but ‘browsed’ or ‘licensed’.

Open Network

If scientific administrators aspire to accelerate innovation by encouraging team science, they must address this issue. Our university system should reward scientists who are honest and fair in their dealings with fellow investigators.  Specific protocols for guiding research and managing disagreements must be designed. Accurate laboratory records should reflect appropriate credit, and websites sponsored by international scientific organizations should be similarly designed to display accurate attribution of preliminary scientific discoveries. In addition, journals could post final drafts of papers before publication, allowing anonymous comments during a probationary period. If a substantive objection arises, the journal should require revisions or even reject the paper.