One evening some months back I had a marvelous dinner in Melbourne with Terry Cutler, a Board Member (at the time, acting as Chairman) of the CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. In our enthusiastic exploration of the efficiencies and opportunities of rethinking innovation systems to embrace open systems and commons of capability, Terry [...]

Posted on February 28th, 2008 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: BiOS Licensing, EOS, General, Science | 1 Comment »

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 [...]

Posted on February 28th, 2008 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: BiOS Licensing, Patents, Science, Social Enterprise | 4 Comments »

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 [...]

Posted on April 4th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: BiOS Licensing, General, Patents | No Comments »

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 [...]

Posted on April 4th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: BiOS Licensing, General, Patents, Science, Social Enterprise | 1 Comment »