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 »

This topic is such fun, I could log in each day and all the ideas I’ve had for thirty years would start lining up on the framework of hologenomics.
In the last few years our lab has been getting more deeply into Type IV Secretion Systems. We set out some years back to ‘re-invent’ [...]

Posted on September 9th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: Evolution, Science | 2 Comments »

This one is a treat. An opportunity to blog about my ideas on science! It seems that most of my efforts these days are focused on BiOS, patent transparency and innovation strategies. Science is still an important part of my life, but my dismay at the way it has been [...]

Posted on September 6th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: Evolution, Science | 1 Comment »

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. [...]

Posted on September 5th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: General, Patents, Science, Social Enterprise | No Comments »

In two weeks - April 19th - I’ll be at another conference in Melbourne, the World Congress of Science Journalists. At that congress, I’ll be producing a session about who benefits from science in a world where virtually every scientific discovery and platform is patented, and the elephant in the room: capability to use [...]

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

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 [...]

Posted on April 4th, 2007 by Richard Jefferson
Filed under: Patents, Science, Social Enterprise | 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 »