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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.In 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?

Patents are teachings.

They are – according to the letter of the law – fully open documents that exist to enable innovation.   Their very purpose – historically – is to disclose to the entire world exactly how to create a particular new, non-obvious and useful invention.

And in exchange for a full disclosure of how to make this invention, if the invention is described accurately and the patent office agrees that is meets its standards, the owner of the patent acquires a right to exclude others from precisely this invention for a limited time, and in a particular jurisdiction.  The standards of these patent granting agencies however can exist on the continuum from mediocre to execrable and from incomprehensible to inconsistent.   Making the whole enterprise extremely contentious, litigious, expensive and fraught.

So there’s good and bad.  The good is that the patent (and the aggregated millions of such patents) are indeed recipes for enterprise.  The bad is that there’s a dog in the manger.   Each patent grant gives the owner only a right to stop others from actually practicing the patent and does not accord the owner any right to practice her own invention!  This counter-intuitive observation is key to understanding the system and moving forward.

Patents are not innovations, they are inventions.  Modern innovations that hinge on science- and technology, for instance new communications technologies, materials, new energy technologies, new medical devices or vaccines, or new crops, typically don’t hinge on one invention and one technology. They require hundreds of pieces of science and technology to assemble the real innovation – the impact on the marketplace.   And yet each piece of the puzzle, each feature of the landscape, can be represented by a single (or even multiple) patents in many jurisdictions.

There is a metaphor worth exploring.

Patents can be thought of as features on a map.    If we use the maritime charts as thought canvas, each patent could be a submerged rock, a feature on a coastline, a deep channel, a current, a continent!, a reef, a shoal, a distance of blue water; the owners of these patents could be those with control of a port, influence over trading partners, layers of mines or of marker buoys, or indeed fellow sailors and explorers.

But knowing of one or even a few of such features doesn’t really help navigation and doesn’t help one chose a course for effective sailing and trade.

It is knowing how the pieces fit together, how the features learned about through painstaking exploration meld into a map: a navigation chart, that allows choices to be made that limit risk.

Countries whose success depends on guarding and blocking access to seaways ultimately senesce and implode in economic stagnation, while those which navigate and trade on these waters succeed through economic vigor and growth.

The greatest value in maps is not choosing one particular path. Rather it lies in making it possible of choosing any of countless paths, informed by not making hundreds of  counterproductive or even catastrophic courses.   We simply can’t know what opportunities like ahead, but we should be able to avoid clear and present danger.

These are Rumsfeld’s ‘Known Unknowns’.  The things we could know about that we should know about.

Now to innovation:

Knowing of (or even owning) one or several patents is at best one tiny step in choosing or creating an effective innovation trajectory.

Most importantly we need to understand the landscape, the inventions, components, partners, capital we need to pull together to create an economically viable chance.

We can’t guarantee – by its very nature – that an innovation will succeed.

But we can with great confidence find many points that will guarantee its failure.  If we don’t know of the hundred pieces of the puzzle we require to make our innovation work, if we don’t know what they are, who owns them, how long the control is for, what their motivations might be, how we could choose alternative components, we simply cannot move forward with any confidence or energy.

The patent system as it exists now has swollen to an almost unimaginable complexity and opacity.  There are tens of millions of patents issued, with millions in force in over a hundred countries, and all variable in quality, reach and implications.  Each new technology field spawns regulatory and standards information that is implicit in these disclosures, but not explicit.  Patterns of influence and control, of ownership and permission shift like sands.    But these are critical features to understand if we are to conduct and invest in innovative business practice – especially that informed by the excitement of new science.

This is point of great opportunity.  Exposing the Known Unknowns.

And it is the single greatest enabler of innovation.  To help create open public charts – navigation tools – of the world of innovation intelligence.   Combining unprecedented transparency in patent systems with integration of science, technical, regulatory, legal and business information to create a global resource for all innovation enterprise – in public and in private sector – to actually SEE the hidden shoals, the cryptic opportunities.

We need a facility to make decisions based on clarity and confidence, to reduce the ‘Known Unknown’ to avoidable problems and graspable opportunities.

We need to celebrate the excitement of the right kind of unknowns and let this dominate our innovation culture.

Innovation is a balance between creative and generative processes on one hand, and exposure to the sometimes cryptic logic of a market on the other.    Between these poles are reefs and current that we must map to create a more effective system.

Doing this – creating an open, global cartography for science- and technology-driven problem solving and providing a worldwide resource to support informed decisions,  will truly be Enabling Innovation.

In future blogs and presentations, I’ll go into much more detail on what the state of play is in patent and innovation information, and how this can be changed and democratized.

I’ll also explore the exciting parallels between innovation in economics and society, and evolution in biological systems.   I’ll talk about how radical and riveting new understanding of biological systems evolve can inform and guide breakthroughs in innovation system design.

This blog post is derived from an ex tempore presentation I made on a panel in May in Doha, Qatar at the World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Summit, and again for ‘enable brisbane’ website.

// //

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.

Rosenberg E, Koren O, Reshef L, Efrony R, Zilber-Rosenberg I.

Nat Rev Microbiol. 2007 May;5(5):355-62. Epub 2007 Mar 26. Review.PMID: 17384666 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

Email thread:

from: Eugene Rosenberg <eros@post.tau.ac.il>

to: Richard Jefferson <raj@cambia.org>

date: Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 7:25 PM

subject: Re: Hologenome theory, microbiome / holobiont

Dear Richard,

Wow. What a joy to read your e-mail and blog. Before commenting, let me inform you that I am a young 75 year old general microbiologist that has published 250 scientific articles, almost exclusively on experimental studies on myxobacteria, hydrocarbon degradation by bacteria and more recently bacterial diseases of corals. My wife, Ilana, is the best nutritionist in Israel, with a strong background in biochemistry and microbiology. We came to the concept of the hologenome (I now include you in the “we”) from am attempt to explain how a particular coral became resistant to bacterial bleaching. Clearly, we share your view of the holobiont as a unit of selection in evolution of animals and plants.

Where do we go from here? Your clear discription of the glucuronide conjugate system is a fine example of how the microbes are an integral part of host metabolism. Furthermore you speculate that these reactions can lead to mating selection. Now to blow your mind- We have been working on the role of bacteria in mating selection for the last two years. It started when my wife found a paper in Evolution, published 20 years ago by Diane Dodd. She took a population of Drosophila from Bruce Canyon and raised half of them on a starch diet and the other half on maltose. After a year, she mixed them, and found the “starch flies” perfered to mate with ”starch flies” and “maltose flies” perfered to mate with “maltose flies.” Although they offered no explaination for this mating selection, my wife and I immediately thought bacteria. So, I put a graduate student, Gil Sharon, on the problem. He first repeated Dodd’s experiment using the standard laboratory strain of D. malanogaster and sucrose instead of maltose. Mating selection occurred after two generations and was maintained for 30 generations. When we added antibiotics, mating selection was abolished, indicating bacteria were responsible. Furthermore, we infected the antibiotic-treated flies with their homologous bacteria (isolated prior to antibiotic treatment) and mating selection was reestablished. We sent a manuscript to Nature and they rejected it, saying they would reconsider if we identified the specific bacterium responsible for the mating selection. This has not been an easy task, but we are still working on it.

Regardless of the particular bacterium, what is the mechanism? We have been extracting flies with pentane and doing GC-MS. There are differences between the “starch flies” and the “sucrose flies”.

Maybe the glucuronide system is involved.

It was a pleasure to hear from you. Let’s keep in contact.

Shalom

Eugene

Eugene Rosenberg, Professor Emeritus
Dept. of Molecular Microbiology and Biotechnology
Tel Aviv University
eros@post.tau.ac.il
+972-3-6409838

—– Original Message —–

From: Richard Jefferson

To: eros@post.tau.ac.il

Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 8:27 AM

Subject: Hologenome theory, microbiome / holobiont relationships etc

Dear Professor Rosenberg,

I am writing firstly to compliment you and Professor Zilber-Rosenberg on your clear, lucid and compelling writing in the last years on the hologenome theory.

I have read these with great interest and pleasure.  I particularly commend you for the fine exposition in the FEMS and the Environmental Microbiology review and opinion piece, respectively.

I am a molecular biologist, and now as well innovation system strategist, currently with funding from the Gates Foundation.    I started work in molecular biology in 1974, and in the late 70′s and subsequently I began working with the glucuronide metabolism pathways of commensal vertebrate microbes, including E. coli.   It became very clear to me fairly early that the suite of capabilities to import, metabolize and ‘share’ the products of xenobiotic and endobiotic metabolism by gut microbes was central to the selective performance of the host and microbiome – the holobiont.

As I became involved in the earliest days of agricultural biotechnology, my focus on systems-level understanding and intervention continued to be informed by this awareness.   I was convinced that the model system approaches which were and are so joyously productive, may not have been as joyously instructive as to the workings and logic of natural systems as embedded through natural (or in agriculture, human) selection.

I’ve written about this approach a little, but I’m not very prolific as a writer (I would make a terrible academic, alas).  I have however been speaking and promoting this work for many years as part of my work as founder of Cambia – an international non-profit institution.

I attach to this a link to my blog (rarely visited, rarely updated) in which I wrote down some of my thoughts.  ( http://blogs.cambia.org/raj/index.php/2007/09/06/the-hologenome-hologenomics/ ).  I also have in my blog (the top of the blog) links to videos of lectures I”ve given at Cold Spring Harbor in 1994 on the hologenome, and its implications; and presentations in South Africa in 1997 (I’d love to share with you my old powerpoint if you’re interested) in which I refer to our molecular work on glucuronide metabolism and the logic of applying eco-therapeutics and the understanding and adjustment of the hologenome to health challenges.     Term ‘hologenome’ and ‘holobiont’ and its critical role in evolution were proposed by me at that CSH lecture and since, and I was overjoyed to read your parallel and independent articulation of their importance, especially with regard to the critical horizontal inheritance opportunities for the fitness of the selected holobiont in a complex environment.

This has continued to be my intellectual focus for much of the last 30 years, but most of my work has been focused on democratizing science-enabled innovation through ‘open source’ type approaches, and through increasing the transparency and fairness of intellectual property systems.

I would be thrilled to be in correspondence with you about these ideas – they shape my thinking in many fields, and I’m musing very hard about setting up experimental systems to test the hologenome theory, which to me is compelling.  My laboratory has been in storage now for over a year since our institute moved from Canberra to Brisbane, but within a year I expect I may be back to full steam.  I’ll likely be doing a ‘sabbatic’ of sorts at Berkeley  from July – December and look forward to getting back into the game, as our Initiative for Open Innovation goes to scale and can be taken over by other champions.

Again, my warmest wishes and congratulations for some of the best science writing I’ve read in a long time.  That we have arrived at virtually identical conclusions from such different perspectives is itself most gratifying.

Best wishes

Richard

Richard A. Jefferson PhD
Chief Executive Officer, Cambia
Director, Initiative for Open Innovation (IOI)
Professor of Science, Technology & Law
Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
G301, 2 George St, Brisbane 4000, QLD Australia
+61 419 499 753 (mobile)  +61 7 3138 4419 (work) +61 7 3138 4405 (fax)
www.bios.net |  www.cambia.org |  www.patentlens.net  | www.openinnovation.org
e: r.jefferson@cambia.org

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

This is no small thing.

The USPTO is expected to raise the revenue from its services to pay for those services.   This should be the subject of further discussion, no doubt, as it is a pernicious way to trap an agency into the status quo.  And one way to raise that revenue is to charge for the most valuable and difficult-to-provide data – the comprehensive ‘Redbook’ data from 2010.     Redbook refers to a quality XML format that also includes the chemical structures, DNA sequences, drawings, mathematical equations and so on, that comprise a machine readable comprehensive disclosure or ‘teaching’.   Redbook is the Gold standard.  The TIFF images of the actual applications and grants are also critical files.     What many don’t know is that the USPTO charges quite a bit for these.   For the US Grants in Redbook format for 2010, they charge 39,000.  For the aggregate 2010 files, Patents, Applications and images, it sets you back USD 94,100.  And yes, each year its about this much.

So imagine the courage and leadership necessary for David Kappos and his team to look at the revenue from selling these products, and to say ‘No, that’s wrong.  The Presidents Open Government Directive makes it clear that these should be public goods, available without fee or favor; bundle them into the bulk downloads’.

Breaking free from institutional capture by revenue stream is amongst the most difficult and bold leadership decisions anyone responsible for an enterprise can make.

So hats off to the whole team at USPTO, to Joey Hutcherson at Commerce and to the Deputy  CTO in OSTP, Beth Noveck, and to Jon Orwant and his team at Google.    Real good citizens!

I attach the letter I sent to David Kappos to thank USPTO.  They are always getting beat up in the blogosphere, but there’s courage there and commitment.   If anyone out there reads this (and I am always feeling like I’m singing in the shower) send them a nice note.

…………….

Mr David Kappos

Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and

Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)

P.O. Box 1450

November 1, 2010

Dear David,

I am writing to commend and congratulate the USPTO for its exceptional and wholly successful initiative to make comprehensive, timely and highest-quality text and data from US Patent Applications and Grants available to the public, in bulk and at no charge.

We also applaud the remarkable progress towards providing other critical data, such as PAIR, Assignment data and Petitions.

The public spirit and professionalism exemplified by these efforts admirably reflect the aspirations and intentions of the Open Government Directive.

It also reflects very well on your partner in this effort, Google, and its willingness and capability to host this bulk data without favor or fee, and to work with USPTO to overcome technical challenges.

In times of economic and environmental crisis, creating a more efficient, productive, transparent and inclusive innovation system is of paramount importance.

The fundamental and legitimate driver of the patent system is to advance the public good.    This is served by balancing the responsibility to explicitly share the teachings of inventions with the public,  with the limited right to exclude others, determined by a judicious and careful examination by the USPTO.    Responsibility must always go hand-in-hand with rights.

While rights are overseen by administrative procedure, the courts, and by competition and antitrust law, the responsibility side of the equation has often languished.

We recognize the unprecedented pressures under which the USPTO operates caused by the number, the volume and the scientific, technical, informational, business and legal complexity of the patent applications and patents it must administer.   We understand how this overwhelming load has made it difficult to meet the full spectrum of responsibilities and expectations to your own or to the public’s desired standard.

Now to its great credit, the USPTO has made a great leap towards ensuring that the teachings of US Patent Applications and Grants are shared effectively and openly.

This in turn will yield great dividends in engaging the public to use these disclosures to enable social and economic progress, and in so doing, finding the value and honing the role of the USPTO in innovation.

If we are to be an engaged and democratic society, the ball is now in our court.     Together we need to make the innovation system more efficient, effective and fair.

Cambia is a globally operating non-profit that has worked for over two decades to change the demographics of innovation, to broaden the scope and diversity of problem solvers and the problems solved, and to enable informed decisions around science- and technology-enabled innovation.

We have done this through CambiaLabs, which has designed, developed and delivered biological enabling technologies with extensive use of the patent system;  Patent Lens, which for over a  decade has provided free, open full text search and analysis of patents worldwide, and shed light on their meaning in open patent landscapes; and through BIOS (Biological Innovation for Open Society, aka Biological Open Source), which explores new cooperative tools, norms and legal instruments for increasing efficiency in life sciences-enabled innovation through improved sharing and distribution of pre-competitive platforms.

In 2009, with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The Lemelson Foundation, we and our colleagues at the Queensland University of Technology began work to integrate these lessons through creation of an open, global facility called the Initiative for Open Innovation (IOI), to promote and enable public ‘Innovation Cartography’.  The IOI benefits from contributions from an extraordinary International Advisory Council which we would be honored for you to join.

IOI strives to make the innovation system more efficient, transparent, inclusive and fair.    We want to enable more people to make better decisions, informed by evidence, but guided by imagination.

We want to enable ‘cartography’ of the innovation landscape, so navigation through from idea to product or service and back again can rapidly and affordably produce new value to society.

Like cartography of the physical world, which for millenia guided trade and commerce, these open and public tools will allow us to minimize avoidable risks and uncertainty, create new partnerships and explore and navigate new trajectories to use inventions and ideas for public benefit.

The core of this open global facility will hinge on the world’s patent information, and the gold standard for that inventive literature corpus is from the USPTO.    This data serves as an entry point for  innovation intelligence and cartography when integrated with global science and technology literature, business, regulatory and standards data.  This will in turn provide a growing public resource for visualization and navigation of the innovation space.

Your actions in going the full distance in providing such high quality and comprehensive data to the public in a form that lends itself to such a global vision, is extraordinarily laudable and shows the highest levels of governmental integrity.

I commend your team for its exemplary public service,

Sincerely,

Richard

Richard A. Jefferson PhD
Chief Executive Officer, Cambia
Director, Initiative for Open Innovation
Professor of Science, Technology & Law,

Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
G301, 2 George St, Brisbane 4000, QLD Australia
+61 419 499 753 (mobile)  +61 7 3138 4419 (work) +61 7 3138 4405 (fax)
www.bios.net |  www.cambia.org |  www.patentlens.net  | www.openinnovation.org
e: r.jefferson@cambia.org

“……..
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.

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.

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 navigate 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’.

But the system is of almost awesome complexity. Single patent documents can be hundreds of pages, with arcane language understood by only a few, and rights interpreted and re-interpreted on-the-fly by courts. Thousands of these can exist in a single field of innovation, with many thousands more latent in the system. One or two may be dominant or none. Fundamental biological processes – such as RNAi, have been patented. Most of the important genes of many important organisms – humans, rice, maize, cattle – have been subject to patent applications and sometimes grants, many of them contestable by many separate claimants.

But its actually worse than that. The ownership of the ‘patent’ itself is usually a matter of public record, but the ownership of the rights – the most important feature of a patent – is completely obscured. Nowhere, in most jurisdictions, is there recorded or available the patterns of power; who owns what rights. A University may own hundreds of patents, but for any of the useful ones, the rights have often been sold. But to whom? Not clear.

When a small company licenses a patent, or develops its own patent portfolio, to whom has it licensed and on what terms? The patterns of power and ownership are as important – and in the aggregate perhaps more important – than any other feature of a patent grant. And yet we have no public information whatsoever, except in piecemeal and scattered disclosures. Some jurisdictions, including Brazil, do impose a responsibility on licensees to disclose – at least to the patent office. But most do not. And none make it easy to find this information.

Now, as public agencies and universities come to increasingly dominate filings, the emergence of the trolls from under the bridges makes crossing so much more challenging. Imagine building a cart – or worse, investing in roads – when not only the spokes are proprietary, but the axles, the cart-bed, the yokes and even the oxen. It should be no surprise then that the few innovations from biotechnology to see the light of day and the tests of the market are such lucrative Spanish Galleons as Roundup Ready and Herceptin.

Our maps are still parchment and vellum in an age of informatics.

The Cambia PatentLens aspires to provide an integrated platform on which diverse actors can collaborate to create informatics-empowered and human- enriched environment to reduce the complexity, the opacity and the barriers of the patent system.

We are doing this by collecting, associating and harmonizing the data structures for patents and patent applications for major jurisdictions, combining these with patent status information and making these available at no cost to all.

As with maritime charts, there is a great difference between the resolution required to cross an ocean and that required to navigate safely into anchor at port. We are working towards development of patent landscapes (though in keeping with my maritime metaphor I should perhaps call them seascapes) in key fields of interest where professional knowledge and interpretation is absolutely required to have any sense of the extent of coverage and its meaning. And these will in turn serve as platforms for decision support in biological innovation. If Biological Open Source is to have any traction, it will be through the realization that the delivery of innovations into the market place will be the metric by which we will be judged, not just by collaborative science and information. And this means that the maps to create a clear way forward must be made and followed.

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.