Archive for the ‘BiOS Licensing’ Category

The Illahee Talk: opening the innovation ecology

August 31st, 2011

A few months ago, I had the opportunity to speak in Portland, Oregon on my thoughts of opening the innovation ecology.   The talk was sponsored by a non-profit, Illahee.org.

The talk was introduced by Illahee’s Director, Peter Schoonmaker.   In his  blog post, Peter described his summary of my presentation.

I used the occasion to wax lyrical about the congruence of the hologenome theory of evolution with our work on creating an open and transparent innovation cartography tool.

I tried to find a common thread of ‘biological innovation’ that can guide not only the practical realities of improving health, agriculture, environment and energy, but also the formation of productive and equitable economic and social structures and tools.

The full video of this presentation is available on Vimeo:   Enabling Innovation

The Lens I: What it’s all about

August 31st, 2011

Since its inception twenty five years ago, Cambia has had one goal, even a passion:  to ‘democratize’ science-enabled innovation.

After over twenty years of laboratory work in CambiaLabs, creating, distributing and supporting openly available biological enabling technologies to the global research community –  some of which are amongst the most widely used in the field – we hung up our lab coats and put away our pipettes a few years back.

After over ten years of developing, improving and hosting the Patent Lens,  a hugely popular open web resource, we’re soon to be retiring the site per se.

After almost ten years designing, launching and supporting the BIOS Initiative (Biological Innovation for Open Society, aka Biological Open Source), its new ‘open source’ licensing strategies and its online collaboration platform Bioforge, we pretty much stopped about three years ago.  We turned off bioforge.net.

So we’re quitting?  We’ve run out of steam?    Is this the inevitable demise of the simplistic, science as social enterprise, sharing paradigm?

No bloody way, mate.

We have worked hard, contributed some and learnt much in these decades.   But progress through scientific method is based on having hypotheses *disproved*, not proved.     In the course of this – with careful design and with some grudging willingness be wrong – one gets closer to a truth.

So, doing all this stuff, we identified a common global, structural and systemic opportunity to change the system.

Biological Open Source won’t work without it.   Bioforge didn’t work without it. The Public Sector works very poorly without it.   Small enterprise desperately needs it.  Big business wastes billions to get it.

The biggest inefficiency in the history of post-enlightenment civilization is now entrenched, ubiquitous and feels inevitable.

And its pretty similar to the development of clergy, with their ecclesiastical literature, liturgy and their choke hold on society for the previous millenium.

Put simply,  we have to completely shift the demographics of problem solving by creating a global, open and dynamic resource for ‘innovation cartography’.

We must make it possible for virtually anyone to understand the landscapes of science, intellectual property, business, regulation and other innovation ‘intelligence’ that is necessary to make creative enterprise a possibility at all levels of society.

Creating and using credible dynamic landscapes showing the What, Who, Which, When, Where and Why of science-enabled innovation,  individuals and institutions in public and private sector can envision trajectories, partnerships, strategies, risks and opportunities.   We can engage untapped social, financial and intellectual capital to solve real and compelling problems.

These may be food, health, environment, energy or virtually any other productive economic activity.

The Lens

It would have been unthinkably hard ten years ago.  Five years ago, untenable and outrageously expensive.

Now, its manageable, affordable.  And essential.

The next posts will be about the ‘how’.

But it will *start* with  the world’s patents as the entry point to innovation intelligence.

 

Why should a multinational (e.g Monsanto) participate in an open source initiative?

February 28th, 2008

A couple of years ago, a contributor to the BioForge forum, ‘Meredith’, asked me why Monsanto would ever participate in the BiOS Initiative or any other open source idea. I decided to repost an edited form of my reply here, since many others ask the same question. Well, Monsanto STILL hasn’t signed up. It has however published patent applications showing that our Transbacter technology – which is a core CAMBIA BiOS work product – works well in their key crops (soybean, corn, canola, cotton). It validates both our technology and more importantly, the premise that a dominant patent could be used to leverage community access to improvements.

“……..
Of course the only entity that can speak for Monsanto is Monsanto, so commentary by any of us about why or whether they’ll participate is only conjecture.

However, I would comment that ‘financial savvy’ is a great reason for them to participate on several fronts. By thinking of the different ‘levels’ at which technologies act, one can imagine different treatments of these technologies with regard to sharing or hoarding.

This is similar to considerations of the ‘stack’ in software, where such components as operating systems, programming languages, interoperability standards, middleware are generally shared tools required to move the sector forward. Then applications or suites of capabilities represent commercially viable products and services.

The same distinction works in biotechnology. (more…)

Reinventing Wheels: How biological open source licensing works.

April 4th, 2007

Almost all technologies in the life sciences are intertwined and interdependent. Few discoveries stand on their own, and fewer inventions. Not only do they each depend on the pre-existing knowledge base, they almost always incorporate components of many other technologies in their execution.

This is particularly true for tools and technologies that are what I call ‘meta-technologies’, whose effects are broad and that are useful for communities of innovators who are quite distant from the inventor of the tool.

Consider the wheel. It is clearly a tool, and clearly a meta- technology. In some ways, it is the most fundamental and important tool in society, as it has so many uses, unanticipated by its inventor(s). These uses are countless, and they are mostly made by people who are not wheel-builders.

(more…)

Not Access to Knowledge, but Capability to Use Knowledge!

April 4th, 2007

I attended a meeting called A2K (Access To Knowledge) held at Yale last year (Conference Wiki).   I got to hang with some friends whom I admire, like Yochai Benkler (one of the organizers) and to get to know some remarkable people, like Shay David – a clear and articulate thinker who has since visited us in Canberra.

For all the quality at the meeting, I was somewhat disappointed that there was an exclusive focus on ‘making information available’, but no one was talking about the Elephant in the Room, namely the extraordinary restrictions that were developing on the ‘capability to make use of that information’.

It shouldn’t have been surprising I suppose, for a group of academics – for indeed it was pretty much all academics save perhaps me and the janitor – to not be worried about constraints to the creation of tangible economic value – the core of innovation, as it is generally outside of their purview. But it was nonetheless greatly unsettling. I find the simple thought experiment that comes from testing hypotheses in physics to be a useful exercise.

If you’re proposing a course of action, it is instructive to imagine it succeeding (testing the hypothesis at the limit cases), and asking what consequences would eventuate. In the case of universal access to information, let’s imagine all information is available to everyone, everywhere, at no cost. What then?

Well, ultimately there is no impact of that information on our lives until it is ‘converted’ into products or processes. And the ability to ‘convert’ knowledge, what I call the ‘capability to use knowledge’ is associated with barriers, the most prominent one these days being patents. Thus, if you control by patent (or other means) the permissive use of a process of actually making a drug based on some scientific information; or making a crop based on rice genome information; or making a diagnostic for cancer based on clinical data, then you have effectly co-opted and obtained exclusive control over the value of the entire supporting body of ‘public’ information. So that ‘public information’ only there as a publicly funded (or publicly sanctioned) subsidy of the value proposition for those who control its further development into economic outcomes.