Archive for the ‘Social Enterprise’ Category

van Linschoten: WikiLeaks WritLarge

August 31st, 2011
Linschoten

Jan Huygens van Linschoten

The world’s greatest disruptive act of  Open Access Publishing.

The Dutch are pragmatists.   If there’s a more practical, hard-nosed, outcome-oriented culture that is steeped in business and trade, it might be the Chinese.  But the Dutch are (in so many ways) giants in the history of trade and commerce.

So it may be surprising that what is arguably history’s most disruptive act of creating a ‘commons of knowledge’ that opened up global trade to competition and fair-play came from a Dutchman,   Jan Huygens van Linschoten.

van Linschoten managed in a single act of sharing – in his case the pilfered Portuguese portolans and charts – to open the world of maritime commerce up to free and open competition, stimulating an era of growth and innovation in technology – shipbuilding, sailing, logistics, cartography and navigation – and in business – insurance, investment tools, financial instruments – that changed civilization for ever.

In 1596 or thereabouts, van Linschoten published what had for over a century and a half, the state secrets of Portugal – the maritime cartography of the Indies – West and East.

Innovation cartography: Mapping and navigating the IP landscape

January 10th, 2011
 
 
 
 
 

The Unknown

“As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know
We don’t know.”
 

 
—Feb. 12, 2002, Department of Defense news briefing, Donald Rumsfeld
 
 
 
These now immortal words of the neo-bard Donald Rumsfeld, though often lampooned, actually provide a helpful insight into the nature of innovation and landscapes on which it occurs.
 
Innovation, like navigating the high seas, is as much a matter of not steering a wrong course as it is steering the right one.   This is particularly so for those whose resources are limited, and where the risk of failure courts disaster.MapIn innovation thinking – itself almost an oxymoron – talking about how to make right choices and fostering sparks of creativity seems the dominant discourse.

But the realities of innovation are that most of the innovation process is grueling hard work, and the hard yakka is in avoiding stuff ups: endeavouring mightily not to ‘run aground, or crash into continents’.

So what are these continents, the reefs, the shoals and the currents that could take our ship of creative product and service delivery down to Davy Jones?

In those sectors driven by science-and technology-enabled innovation (SEI),  much of the uncertainty, the obscurity, the buried bommies are in the world of intellectual property, and most of this in the patent literature.

Curiously however – much of the excitement and opportunity of future and futuristic problem solving also lies in this same byzantine, obscure, clergy-ridden literature.

So what is it and how do we navigate it?

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The hologenome theory of evolution

November 16th, 2010

I’d like to share an email exchange I had some months ago with Eugene Rosenberg, one of the authors of some extremely interesting papers outlining the hologenome theory of evolution.   He and his wife, Ilana Zilber-Rosenberg apparently completely independently from me articulated the hologenome theory from their experiences in microbiology and nutrition, and coral microbiology in particular.

In 2009, I found some Rosenberg papers describing the hologenome theory from 2008 and 2009.  I was delighted at the clear and lucid writing and exposition, and that their observations leading to the hologenome concept came from such a different field to my own.

My  development of the hologenome theory in 1991-1994 came from two avenues of work I’d been pursuing for some years:

1)  vertebrate commensal microbes and their role in controlling critical hormones necessary for macro-organism fitness and

2) the role of endophytic and epiphytic microbes in plant performance in agriculture, including of course rhizobia and numerous other plant-associated bacteria.

USPTO Delivers big time: Free, fast, timely public access to the best patent data

November 4th, 2010

At Cambia, to create the Patent Lens (www.patentlens.net) we’ve probably spent USD 300,000 or more over the years to acquire and serve to the public the full text and images of  US Patents and Applications.   This is a pretty heavy load for a small non-profit, but through commitment by our supporters, we’ve managed.

When the Open Government Directive was announced in the current administration, I was hopeful that the US Patent and Trademark Office would begin to make its bulk patent data available at no cost, and as well, create a way for the public to access the important ancillary data relating to status and prosecution history, called ‘PAIR’.

When USPTO announced the unusual partnership with Google to do just that, I was both pleased and a bit nervous that this was creating a cozy relationship with one big player in the information space, reminiscent of the relationships that EPO has had with ‘added value’ information gatekeepers.   I was also a bit skeptical that it would work and would deliver.

What happened in the last months since Jon Orwant at Google began hosting the bulk data was remarkable.    But it was incomplete.   The most valuable information (financially and often technically) is the most recent set of documents – the applications and grants published this year – and ideally this minute.      And these were lacking.    Until a couple of weeks ago, there was essentially no 2010 data on the Google bulk site.

I was concerned by this, and spent some serious time and bandwidth in conversations and emails with people in the Government and at Google, and in the last couple of weeks, the responsiveness of the USPTO, Google, the Commerce Department and the Office of Science & Technology Policy  has been nothing short of spectacular.   In fact, the whole experience made me realize that ‘Open Government’ is a passion and a mission to many of its practitioners in Washington and Virginia, and that there are some real heroes in the system who should get recognition.

In short, they made very courageous decision to provide to the public the highest margin data that they currently sell, at no cost, and on time.  And then they actually did it.  http://www.google.com/googlebooks/uspto-patents.html

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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…)

Initiative for Open Innovation

September 5th, 2007

Well, its been a busy few months since my last post. I’ve been constantly traveling to meetings and working with prospective partners to try to generalize our work.

It now seems that the fundamental power of a harmonized patent informatics platform and a facility for supporting open innovation work has become widely appreciated. We’ll be going to scale soon with a sector-agnostic activity we call the Initiative for Open Innovation (IOI) under which the Patent Lens will be a prominent platform.

I’ll write extensively over the next weeks about this, but briefly the idea is to form a worldwide open access capability to integrate, parse, visualize and analyze patent data over all nations and all innovation sectors. We will develop – collaboratively – open source, community participation web apps which will allow creation and curation of ‘landscapes’ of key IP areas, for instance, influenza vaccines, RNAi technologies, cancer diagnostics, agricultural genetic resources and so on.

However, its now becoming clear that this should extend well beyond the life sciences, as indeed virtually all innovation activity is facing the complexities of a patent system in meltdown. Transparency really is critical, but the transparency must provide for high level oversight, not just the piecemeal ability to search for patents. Rather it will be critical that all interested citizens, scientists, business people and policy makers should be able to visualize and appreciate the nature and extent of current and projected patent coverage over areas of particular interest. This will require highly professional curation, annotation and involvement, but it will be greatly facilitated by sophisticated informatics.

Our intention is to work with many nations to digitize and integrate their own patent information so it can be searched in their own languages, and with natural language translation where possible, to open it for inspection to all citizens, everywhere. Of course, APIs provision and mirroring in diverse locations is part of the plan; but the foundation of the platform – the Patent Lens – is anticipated to become an enabling facility for open innovation.

Much more to come in future posts.

Mapmakers & mariners, shipwrights & sailors

April 4th, 2007

I made a presentation at the A2K meeting last year called Mapmakers and Mariners, Shipwrights and Sailors. I had prepared it while sitting on the stage listening to the other speakers (my preferred mode of preparation). it was inspired by a conversation I had with a fine journalist named Kenn Cukier.

In that discussion we were exploring the parallels between the intense competition to navigate the oceans during the creation of the European mercantile empires of the 1400-1800s, and the ability to navigatekenn-cukier.jpg the patent world now in the new millennium. In both cases, the proprietary knowledge of the routes, the shoals, the dangers, the currents and the ports was of enormous importance for achieving commercial advantage, and of course economic primacy.

Kenn later went on to write an exceptional piece for Nature Biotechnology about navigating patents in biotechnology, further exploring this metaphor.   In the late 1600’s, the Spanish could risk the Manila Galleon traveling from the far East to Spain via the Pacific Ocean – and many of the annual Galleons sunk – because the reward was so high. The profits on silk, silver and spices were astronomical. Navigation and seamanship would have to be exquisitely well developed to justify smaller profits; simply to drop the risk profile. And indeed over the years, as both cartography and maritime technology improved, so did the volume, quality and reciprocity of trade. And of course it was the tools development that drove the navigational capability: the marine sextant allowed latitude to be calculated, the marine chronometer, the longitude.

It is clear that the ability to see the dangers and opportunities, the detritus and the value within the patent system was going to be critical if science and technology is to achieve a greater social good, especially for small markets or weak market signals – one way to say ‘for the benefit of poor people’.

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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.