Semi-live-blogging Anthony Townsend

Anthony Townsend of the Institute for the Future (former Yale undergrad!)

• Wondering whether places like campuses can be used as “living labs” for experimenting with IP regulation.
• Forecasting trends
• Institute for the Future: apply forecasting to private sector or non-defense public sector to help groups understand trends in sci/tech/innovation
• Innovation crisis in future?
• US losing leadership in sci-tech; less money in education, etc.
• Publishers that are huge are not seeing themselves in the future… scared
• Universities have an expanding role
• Going to be a “hollow years” gap since tech transfer mechanisms are getting worse
• To stay up to date, companies adopting open innovation
• These companies are resembling universities 25 years ago–not as focused on protecting IP, more into gains from sharing
• More and more universities are aggressively licensing and looking more like corporations
• Massive experimentation in collaboration – uses LHC as example (but this is… science… has always tended to be collaborative, though not perfectly)
• Transdisciplinary collaboration too
• More groups and companies (incl. startups) are sharing intellectual property (uh FOSS been there, done that?)
• Talks about Betaworks, Kitchen Budapest, Two-fiftyfour
• Science 2.0 and group economies – innovative milieu
• Talks about how more and more companies are “desperately seeking places to let them try out new models”
• Joint ventures just not cutting it
• “Can We Use Place As a Container for Open IP Frameworks?”
• “Has this been tried before? Could this be a laboratory for open IP frameworks?
• Is it a potential end-run around patent reform and other major regulatory interventions?
• What are the sources of value creation in open IP frameworks?
• Assuming public funds are involved, what is the right time horizon for return on investment?”
• Balkin speaks: talks about limited commons and regulated membership, talks about firms (“Stop thinking about the firm as a business, and start thinking about the firm as a group of people sharing things”) – reminds me of a certain Yochai Benkler reading… – Jesus Christ he’s laying the smackdown on him
• Laura DeNardis asked Townsend why he’s focusing so much on place, which seems antithetical to the idea of open innovation
• He… seemed to dodge that question.
• Said that MIT’s OCW was a marketing effort to get people to come to MIT
• Claims that virtual places have severe limitations
• Suggesting perhaps something that says… any firm that earns less than some arbitrary value in revenue has some sort of immunity of infringing on other companies’ patents, and having some sort of open patents library or something

~ by adikamdar on March 24, 2009.