The idea of open innovation is making its way into the technology transfer vocabulary. It is not clear at all, however, that open innovation is much understood. I have been working with open concepts my entire career in technology transfer. I am not new to this stuff. I’ve worked with open source, built commons, played with social network effects, and developed open projects.
I can tell you first hand that open is very challenging for folks deeply invested in conventional university approaches.They don’t get the operating models, the economics, the vocabulary, the flow of authority, the self-stabilizing and organizing, and the idea of planning based on means rather than on goals. It goes past them. Worse and worse when well meaning folks try to harmonize open methods with what they are already doing, as if it isn’t obvious what the rhetorical trick is relative to the underlying practice. For instance, hosting a “technology show case” to pitch available patent licenses isn’t open innovation, but for the idea that a university is trying to license. That people come and meet each other at the event is hardly the deal, at least with regard to the pitch.
I can tell you as well that large swaths of the little linear model as it is laid out are aimed at preventing open methods. Or, more particularly, the little linear model seeks only the tiniest gesture to open, and that’s the end of it. Everything else appears as a threat, foolish, fluffy, or irrational. Thus, I’m wary of discussing open for fear of reprising these old fusses.
Open innovation is about moving bits of discovery, invention, tool, and information among individuals and organizations to produce stuff that cannot be so readily conceived or developed or adopted if done entirely within one’s own organization.
The roots of open innovation lie in three elements. First, in the recognition that innovation is fundamentally social—in generation, in development, in adoption. Second, in the contrast between a corporate approach that stockpiles inventions and works of authorship as a defense to competitive threats or just in case rather than making those inventions and works available to others. Third, in the development of methods by which inventions and works are made available to others, and in turn the inventions and works of others are obtained. These methods go beyond one-shot transactions.
Standards development has long been a form of open innovation. University agricultural extension offices also have used open innovation approaches in working practices from lab to farm, and from farm to lab. Translational medicine tries to do much the same thing, as between lab and clinic. Recent illustrations of open innovation include open source software and Creative Commons approaches to the dissemination of software and creative works, respectively. Other examples include crowd sourcing for solutions to industrial technical problems, grand challenge approaches to development, and multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary research efforts, such as those led by the Myelin Repair Foundation. The GreenXchange is one of the latest efforts to create an open innovation environment by using the capabilities of the web to manage metadata surrounding license elements to permit broader access and reuse without the usual controls of conventional patent licenses.
What makes open innovation valuable is not that folks have used open approaches for a long time, or that specific social institutions are using open expressly in their naming conventions now, but rather that it points out a contrast between two general ways of going about taking care of business in the world. One of these ways is command and control and the other is to offer and respond. Command and control is the world of people who like to things to be strong and orderly and directed. It evokes a vision with sufficient determination and resources to execute on a plan and impose its order on the world. It is how one assembles an airplane with the goal of building 99 more just like it. If you know what you want and how to get it, then command and control is tried and true.
The use of intellectual property to establish proprietary positions that permit one to impose order on the world is the heart of command and control orientations in technology transfer. What matters: ownership of IP, central control with clear delegations of authority, business plans, contracts, a demand for payment. What one wants is products without competition that makes knock offs.
Offer and respond takes a decidedly different approach. It does not seek to impose order on the chaotic world, but rather to attract, filter, and respond to that chaos. It finds a different set of patterns to work on. Offer and respond is the domain of exploration, voyages of discovery, of empirical science, of finding things out rather than proving one’s assertions right. Courage and curiosity replace a show of orderly purpose. The aim is to discover what the world has in store, and to benefit from the social implications of that discovery. If you don’t know entirely what you want, but are determined to add to the range of choices, then offer and respond is an essential tool.
In technology transfer–the part of technology transfer aiming to create innovation as discovery rather than build innovation as pre-planned product–offer and respond uses IP positions to query the world, draw in expertise, and learn where seams of opportunity are opening up. One does not so much demand order as anticipate it, impose one’s will as learn what that will ought to be. What matters: willing collaboration, reciprocity, critical mass, unexpected results, and benefits beyond one’s own immediate self-interest.
Open innovation moves predominantly in the arena of offer and response. At one edge, we have the Free Software Foundation’s “free as in speech, not beer” formulation of the role of copyright in software distribution and Eric Raymond’s development of the theme of the bazaar of exchange relative to the top-down cathedral of design in the formulation of what software gets developed. At the other, we see Henry Chesbrough’s efforts, and those of other business commentators, to argue that stockpiling patents does not necessarily bring to an organization the benefits that might be claimed, and may even cause damage to future opportunities. At this end of open innovation, there is a call for much greater exchange among organizations to develop new stuff. The argument is that it is the new stuff, not the defense of each and every IP position one may hold, that forms the future economic opportunities companies should be working toward.
For university technology transfer offices, this is a tough lesson. First, folks are readily confused by it. University technology transfer, even in its little linear model mode, has elements of open innovation. University research in theory at least produces inventions, and industry has to be open enough to be willing to take these in and shift investment to them and avoid not-invented-here, and make good things for the public.
So far so good. But open innovation is not merely injecting one’s IP into a willing host and waiting for a bloom of success. That sort of activity has been around for a long time, and is what inventors do in seeking business partners, how companies in the past have gained access to new stuff they didn’t develop, especially on their way to monopolies in electricity or television or 3d printing. Where multiple inventing organizations hold rights and cannot get on with each other, the government has had to step in and push for standards and compromises and cross licenses. These are necessarily messy political fights, and the development of the aerospace industry in the US is a good example of how the problem arises, how it gets addressed, and a decent result as a result of the intervention to break up tiny bits of blocking local control with an open platform that restores access to a broader set of technology than one’s own, at great advantage to some, and at terrible loss to others.