Research Enterprise

Famiya Masood, a columnist for a Pakistani newspaper, argues in a recent article that government-funded research at universities in Pakistan is not “translating into inventions that can be eventually patented.” Masood seems to believe that this is not a good thing and the government should do something about it. It is one thing to argue that a national patent system provides inventors with an incentive to invent–perhaps–but it is quite another to set about to force, as it were, researchers to invent, and to patent their inventions. That’s an incentive more of the form of an offer one cannot refuse.

If a public purpose of research is to create patentable inventions, then one might do well to focus on areas of engineering and chemistry where it is relatively easy to produce inventions. Any decent engineering or chemistry research team can produce twenty or thirty inventions a year. It’s just that there may be hundreds of similar teams all over the world doing the same thing in roughly the same area. What’s the effect? Cumulative technology is fragmented into tiny bits of ownership claim. Every variation and application and method to produce gets claimed up in competing ways by different organizations, all committed to finding exclusive licensees to mass produce something based on their little bit. If only one patent is needed, then perhaps things go well. But if twenty or fifty or two hundred patents are needed, and those patent owners all insist on exclusive licenses, and the twenty universities involved all start their own companies so they can brag about their exclusive licenses as innovation and economic development, then it is impossible to use, let alone, mass produce anything without infringing some right somewhere. Instead of creating better conditions for innovation–or for mass production–this idea of the patent monopoly in research creates much worse conditions. Continue reading →