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

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.

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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.

Core technologies we call ‘enabling technologies’ are required by all players in the game – whether ‘mom and pop’ plant biotech or Monsanto. And these tools require constant improvements, tunings, expansions and revisions. Such tools would be, for instance, the basic ability to transfer genes to plants, the ability to visualize or select these genes when they are transfered, the ability to modulate, enhance or repress endogenous genes, the ability to map and monitor the genetic segregation and location of genes and so on. These tools are not typically specific to any one crop, or even a particular commercial challenge, but are required for almost any plant biotechnology intervention.

Because these tools are complex and are constantly being revised and extended, there exists a very cumbersome thicket of rights and an unfortunate ‘silo-ing’ of activity on their enhancement and replacement.

This basically means that each improvement often yields yet more patents, or more closed and innefficient nnovation systems, and a fragile innovation ecology.   And research to invent truly creative solutions to such core enabling technology challenges is not sufficiently incented because it is virtually certain not to be able to provide a complete solution to the technical challenge – at least in its first iteration.

A typical technology may require dozens of ‘rights’ to be navigated to ensure commercial use without legal vulnerability. There are hundreds of patents associated with the first act of plant gene transfer – the ‘transformation of plants’ by Agrobacterium. And other steps in the complex pathways are similarly complex. One key right withheld is sufficient to stop a commercial project from proceeding, or at least exposing the commercial entity to serious vulnerability. This vulnerability is typically experienced by any entity – small or large – that is embarking on commercial activity (a single farmer is ‘commercial’, so don’t get tied up thinking it only means multinationals).

However, larger corporations have both more exposure (more assets to lose if litigated successfully or subject to brand-associated market losses) and more financial and business means to bring to a solution to this problem; albeit a short-sighted solution.

Academic use is irrelevant and almost always misleading. In the US and elsewhere academics routinely use countless patented inventions with no licenses, and thus their work is not ‘permissive’ in that it cannot routinely be converted to commercial products without much additional ‘freedom to operate’ analysis and R&D.

And yet here is a point at which the economics comes very much to the rescue.

If all entities need these core tecnologies to advance real applications in the sector (agriculture and food – although exactly the same arguments apply to public health and medicine), then there is massive waste of resources by duplication of efforts, and in cross-licensing, non-licensing, re-invention of the tools and work-arounds that effect no substantial commercial advantage.   They simply allow companies to get to the starting gate of product development.  There is also a huge opportunity to harness and galvanise new technology development by collaborative and shared approaches that has been untapped.

There are however Balrogs in the Woodpile (problems) with this vision that are being opportunistically leveraged by ‘middlemen’. Companies that are own rights to key tools – or companies that are spun off to develop these tools – are generally looking to maximize their financial returns, and this strategy, while of questionable value in wealth creation in a sector or society, is being actively pursued as a wealth accumulation tool by these companies (and indeed some universities who use this ‘ransom’ or ‘last brick’ tool in negotiations).

There are companies that build ‘portfolios’ of patents and rights that make use of particular tools either expensive or impossible (remember many of these companies are not obligated to grant licenses!).

I frankly don’t see much added value in these holders of rights to low-level enabling technology, especially for society or for the sectoral advancement. If Monsanto and others do their sums, they may come to the conclusion that the expense of protecting, licensing and acquisition of enabling technology has added almost nothing to their (black ink) bottom line, but rather has cost them very substantial sums of money – and perhaps as importantly – public respect and goodwill that could be associated with greater communication, and more attention to product and service provision.

If on the other hand, a substantial decentralized open source initiative on key enabling technologies is pursued, with a guarantee that all parties may use the technologies at no cost (other than the summed, sunk costs of their actual development), then the transactions would be almost eliminated (a huge cost in itself), the quality of the technology could rapidly be increased, tested, expanded and adapted, regulatory compliance and standards could be harmonized, and the burdens on acquisition of rights and stacking of royalties would be greatly reduced or eliminated.

Take an example that is very important in biotechnology whether agricultural or medical. Homologous recombination technologies. This suite of technologies – which is not yet practically available – will allow subtle, nuanced changes in genomes that are informed and inspired by the now-routine sequencing of genomes and their variants. Done correctly, there is no reason these should trigger expensive regulatory burdens, and so could be a three-fold boon to agriculture; making immediate value of the massive sequence data greatly increasing the robustness of gene expression by modulating it in situ (where it has evolved to be) and by (potentially) dropping regulatory burdens back to levels associated with any conventional agricultural innovation.

There are many extraordinary publicly funded laboratories who have developed – with taxpayer’s money – components of this suite of technologies which I call collectively ‘HARTs’. These university scientists have often filed patents, and these patents are in some cases then exclusively licensed to a very aggressive company that is in fact not a serious player in the actual ‘sectors’ that stand to benefit. Rather this company is a middleman, potentially extracting massive rents (fees) and otherwise slowing the adoption (and as importantly the critical improvements and evolutions) of the technologies.

This is shameful and a huge loss to the worldwide community, and is typical of why the whole open source biology movement is so important. Whle one can argue facilely (and they do) that these ‘tool companies’ make money for themselves – they do – one cannot so easily see that they participate in social wealth creation.

In the IT industry, these types of entities are called ‘trolls’ or ‘patent terrorists’ or worse. Frankly, they are an aberration in my view. With such fine science in the public interest, with proper coordination and a new, low-transaction cost mechanism (BiOS and BioForge), these investigators are at least and in my view more creative and innovative than the trolls. And should thus contribute to society through provision of their tools to the sectors at no additional cost, allowing private and public resources to be focused on development and performance of new products in real markets, or the accommodation of the needs of small or neglected markets – a critical role of public sector that has been apparently lost in the ozone.

But this cannot happen in a ‘back to the future’ mode of publish and make it in the public domain, much as I would love to see this happen. We need leverage tools to ensure that the information and capabilities are coordinated, pooled and their availability is ensured. This is the power of open source. Not the ‘free’ of cost. But the ability to leverage creative improvements of core technology, and to ensure availability for use by those seeking advancement of society through ethical but sound business practices.

So, in summary, I think Monsanto should participate; I think Dupont and Syngenta and Bayer and Dow and others should participate. But they must not drive the agenda by any means. BASF and many smaller companies are participating in fact. As of 2008, we have over 150 licensees of these technologies

However, these companies – and their counterparts in the pharmaceutical and other life-science fields – are like large political entities – countries – that have embarked in a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario. Who will have the courage to blink? And more importantly, how long will the short sightedness that makes cooperation and open collaboration untenable – persist? Think of the arms race.

Who will say – this is foolish, unimaginative and wasteful?

Its a very hard question. I’m in negotiations with many of these companies, and while privately their senior executives and scientists may agree (and their accountants certainly will), they are – like political entities- themselves subject to huge inertial forces.

Imagine their share values when their courageous CEO gets up and says that their business models based on mergers, acquisitions, agressive litigations etc regarding core technologys, are flawed. Imagine his (or rarely her) rapid departure for ‘more time with their family’. They are strangely boxed into a very difficult situation.

So I don’t see an immediate sea-change unless we are successful (which I think we will be) on going towards new ground and new technologies which they can agree to treat differently than the old ones. I doubt that many of the multinationals will suddenly begin freeing up their existing patent portfolios. But I imagine the smarter of them will see the opportunities to redraw the terms of engagement for future technologies and the powerful economics of shared innovation. In spite of their well deserved reputation for hard-nosed, hard-assed business practice, I find there are still some very thoughtful people in Monsanto who may not see the world in a completely oppressive way, and who may be able to engage in this open source revolution.

But frankly, if they don’t, I’m not losing any sleep. There are way too many smart, ethical and committed scientists and citizens to allow science to become a high-cost tool available only to high-capital enterprises. Too much of agriculture, nutrition, natural resource management, energy, public health, and medicine requires new low-margin, localized innovations. And the power of open innovation can help address this.

Some have asked me how we can fight the powerful, carnivorous Tyrannosaurus of the Multinationals. My answer is to look around.

Where are the Terrible Lizards now? Gone. They’ve been out-evolved by mammals.

We just need to out-evolve them. They can adapt or become extinct.

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.

Consider a six-spoked wheel. The wheel is only useful when it is used for something, such as moving a cart.

The real economic value to society clearly lies not in the price of the wheel, but in the wealth created through the use of the wheel.

If it takes all six spokes for this wheel to turn, and each of these spokes is potentially different in some way, we have a good metaphor for a modern biological technology.

If three of these spokes were discovered years ago, and are in the public domain, with no conditions imposed for their use, we still do not have a ‘wheel’, and our cart can go nowhere. Let us then imagine that the Fourth Spoke of the necessary six spokes is developed in-house by a company, WheelCorp. There is still no wheel, and no movement of the cart. We need six spokes.

Two universities, charged with advancing the public good, have research teams, funded by the Cart Foundation, dedicated to seeing goods, agricultural produce and people move throughout society. One of these teams at University A makes a breakthrough, and creates the Fifth Spoke. Their office of technology transfer, in a breathless compliance with Bayh-Dole, patents this Fifth Spoke. To monetize their patent, they then license the Fifth Spoke to WheelCorp (who have offered the highest price). They are decent folks, resisting the blandishments of serious money, however and University A makes it a non-exclusive license, in deference to a little-read clause in Bayh-Dole.

Now the Sixth Spoke is finally developed by University B. Their office of technology transfer, not sure of how to proceed, nevertheless decides to patent it, to keep options open. Their newly appointed Director of Technology Transfer finds herself in a quandary.

She wants to see low-cost carts, moving to and fro in the countryside on affordable wheels, in all shapes and sizes, on countless roads, providing the transport infrastructure to support a growing population and a booming economy. It is obviously a public good and a key to wealth creation. How then does she proceed?

If she does not patent, or abandons the patent on the Sixth Spoke, then it becomes public domain. A good thing, she muses.

Until it dawns on her that WheelCorp has exclusive use of their ‘own’ Fourth Spoke as well as use of the Fifth Spoke patent under license from University A. Putting the Sixth Spoke into the public domain leaves WheelCorp free use of it, and of course, they have unfettered use of Spokes One, Two and Three, control of Spoke Four and access to Spoke Five. This gives them exclusive dominion over the wheel, which will doubtless create monopoly pricing, high rents on each cart, and carts which can only travel on roads made by WheelCorp’s parent company, RoadCorp. An utterly horrible turn of events.

So, looking at her options, she realizes she faces a monopsony. There is only one entity – WheelCorp – that can build a wheel using her patent, so she has no choice but to license her wheel to WheelCorp. If she plays ‘dog in the manger’ and choses not to license, no wheels are made at any price, and no carts roll at all; this very rationale is being promoted by WheelCorps lobbyists in fact. And no money is made by the University. And she’s fired. Even still, she won’t get much money from WheelCorp; there’s no competition. That’s how monopsonies work.

But she is a wily licensor, and she keeps her metrics clear.

Her job, through the public University B, is to advance society as a whole. As a recipient of funding from the Cart Foundation, she feels an additional moral and fiduciary responsibility to their goals. Sensing there’s another way, she phones her old friend from Circus School, Mitchell Baker, of the Mozilla Foundation .

Mitchell simply asks her “Why ask for money in your license? You aren’t going to make much anyway, and the consequences of giving those clowns at WheelCorp the monopoly on the Wheel are dire. Let your mission be the metric. Instead, ask for grant-backs and non-asserts. It works for open source software.

She continues: “‘Firefox’ is a wheel. The public benefits from it; wealth is created through its use. We couldn’t have created it without many spokes from many players, and we wouldn’t have those spokes if they hadn’t been part of an innovation business ecology that uses statutory rights to maintain freedoms. Some of the same spokes are used by our competitors, by Apple and Microsoft. That’s OK. The wheels are better and cheaper, they work on many platforms and the public is better off. And we manage to pay our bills, and we feel good about ourselves.

The Director is floored by the elegance of the plan. So she creates an Open Wheel License, and offers it to all, with simple, non-negotiable terms. The OWL says: “You may use this Spoke for Any Wheel, or indeed Anything At All. There is no financial cost to this license. But you must promise to share any other Spokes or improvements to Spokes with any other licensee under similar terms. And if you acquire any rights to Spokes from anyone else, you may not assert those rights against any Licensee of the Open Wheel License. Finally, if you find out anything about the safety of the Spokes or The Wheel, you must disclose these facts to all Licensees.

Of course WheelCorp is enraged and threatening at first; their business model is based on monopoly. But their parent company and its shareholders, and indeed public outcry at the potential monopolies on Wheels, Carts and Roads force them to see the light. Without wheels, the roads – including those built by RoadCorp on which the real money is made – will not be traveled. So WheelCorp rolls with the punch, albeit grudgingly. They agree not to assert their own ‘Spoke’ patent over other licensees of the OWL.

And they gain, at no expense, the Sixth and Final Spoke.

So they use their considerable know-how to manufacture a pretty good Wheel, which is immediately used by carts around the world, since they’re the first to market. They make pretty good money. But living in a market economy, other entrepreneurs sense they can make better Wheels, and take out OWL licenses, and using their know-how, and additional proprietary ideas (like a rubber tread) that they don’t have to share, they add value to the wheel and begin to manufacture and sell these wheels, driving WheelCorp to further innovate to compete, and prices of wheels go down.

And many roads are traveled by many carts on many different wheels. And it was good.

This parable is not fanciful, nor impractical, although our own real-world experience in forging such licensing communities in biotechnology is of course much messier, slower and more complex. But it is doable and we are doing it.

Diverse and prosperous agriculture, robust public health and sustainable natural resource management are the publicly valuable goals we must keep in clear sight. The tools associated with their improvements must be plentiful, powerful and affordable.

The true wealth will come not through rent-extraction from a tool, but through use of a continuously improving toolkit, with continuously decreasing costs of innovation and a continuously expanding group of tool users.

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.