Shifting Innovation to Users via Toolkits
Eric von Hippel and Ralph Katz 2002
http://userinnovation.mit.edu/papers/10.pdf
Abstract: In the traditional new product development process, manufacturers first explore user needs and then develop responsive products. Developing an accurate understanding of a user need is not simple or fast or cheap, however. As a result, the traditional approach is coming under increasing strain as user needs change more rapidly, and as firms increasingly seek to serve “markets of one.” Toolkits for user innovation is an emerging alternative approach in which manufacturers actually abandon the attempt to understand user needs in detail in favor of transferring need related aspects of product and service development to users. Experience in fields where the toolkit approach has been pioneered show custom products being developed much more quickly and at a lower cost. In this paper we explore toolkits for user innovation and explain why and how they work.
THE PENGUIN’S GENOME, OR COASE AND OPEN SOURCE BIOTECHNOLOGY
David W. Opderbeck*
Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Volume 18, Number 1 Fall 2004
http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v18/18HarvJLTech167.pdf
Extract (p 172-173): My analysis proceeds as follows. Part II of this Article describes the current landscape of the biotechnology commons, including a discussion of the proprietary rights that have alarmed many commentators. Part III discusses whether open source principles can be applied to biotechnology as a practical matter. This Article treats a typical biotechnology patent as an example of the different layers in biotech-nology and discusses whether those layers could fit to an open source paradigm. Part IV examines whether open source should be applied to biotechnology as a normative matter. In particular, this Article reviews prevailing conceptions of the public domain and the information commons, then identifies why these conceptions do not map well onto biotechnology. Finally, Part V discusses typical objections to a Coasian approach for the biotechnology commons, and outlines my proposal for a central market to reduce transaction costs associated with private bargaining over biotechnology rights.
Nanotechnology and the Commons: Implications of Open Source Abundance in Millennial Quasi-Commons
Bryan Bruns
http://www.cm.ksc.co.th/~bruns/opennan2.htm
Abstract. Considering the implications of nanotechnology helps explore the prospects for common property institutions. Open source approaches to developing computer software create new commons in shared intellectual property. Applying open source principles to the development of nanotechnology and biotechnology might accelerate the growth of freely available knowledge. Increasing resource reuse and abundance may shift the balance between private benefits and broader interests in ways that favor the creation of commons. Users of shared spaces that are formally public or private property already assert increasing roles in governance, constituting quasi-commons. Longer lifetimes may encourage the crafting of new commons on a millennial time scale. Nanotechnology opens interesting opportunities for constituting new commons.
Nanotechnology and the Law of Patents: A Collision Course
SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN
New York University – Department of Culture and Communication
in NANOTECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY EVALUATION, Geoffrey Hunt and Michael Mehta, eds., University of Toronto Press, Forthcoming Abstract: In the ill-defined world of “nanotechnology,” a simple sphericule or rod of carbon – the “buckyball” or “nanotube” has been patented not once, but more than 250 times in slightly different forms. The dream of nanotechnology – engineering substances at the scale of one nanometer – reveals many of the dangers of an overprotective patent system. Paradoxically, an overprotective patent system threatens the potential benefits of a fully realized nanotechnology industry. The patent system is supposed to generate a limited monopoly for a specific invention so that the patent holder may extract monopoly rents for a limited time. But by its very nature, nanotechnology complicates the assumptions that underlie the principles of patenting inventions. Nanotechnology bridges the conceptual gaps between substance and information, hardware and software, and technology and science.
