Comments on: Too Much IP Protection is Bad for Innovation

By: The Best IP Strategy Depends on What Your Overall Strategy Is « Innovation Leadership Network

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 06:27:13 +0000

[...] of the areas where I have to do this is intellectual property protection (and here’s John doing the same thing). If I just ask people how you best able to profit from your great ideas, the first and often only [...]

By: IP protection and Open Innovation can work together (if you do it right).

IP protection and Open Innovation can work together (if you do it right). — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 20:21:34 +0000

[...] I’ve written a blog post previously on one of Ammon’s papers where he talks about the Gollum effect, where obsessive IP protection shuts down the possibilities for valuable innovation [...]

By: IP protection and Open Innovation can work together (if you do it right). « Innovation Leadership Network

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 02:20:53 +0000

[...] I’ve written a blog post previously on one of Ammon’s papers where he talks about the Gollum effect, where obsessive IP protection shuts down the possibilities for valuable innovation [...]

By: The Danger of Having Only One Goal « Innovation Leadership Network

The Danger of Having Only One Goal « Innovation Leadership Network — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 06:55:27 +0000

[...] organisations use only a single measure, like patents, or R&D investment, or revenue from new products/services. The problem with this is that [...]

By: What Open Innovation Is Not « Business Models « Innovation Leadership Network

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 06:05:57 +0000

[...] you’ve been reading Tim’s thoughts on patents or my post on the evidence for the Gollum effect of IP being a barrier to innovation, you can probably guess our opinion on the ‘death of open [...]

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:47:03 +0000

Actually, I’ll respond briefly to Ken too – I agree with you about the potential value of Creative Commons licensing. We’ve licensed the blog under CC, and yesterday John & were talking about creating a flickr stream which also be CC licensed. It’s an excellent initiative.

I’m not sure if the license has been directly tested in court, but it certainly had an impressive amount of legal firepower involved in putting it together in the first place, so I’m reasonably confident in CC licenses.

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:43:10 +0000

Here is the post that Matt refers to:

http://www.nearsoft.com/blog/a-virtual-trademark-office-in-second-life.html

& it’s an outstanding one!

I’ll let John respond the rest of the comments.

By: Ken Gillgren

Ken Gillgren — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:17:05 +0000

This is why I’ve become increasingly interested in Creative Commons licensing (http://creativecommons.org/) for sharing and encouraging the mashup of creative ideas while preserving attribution throughout the ongoing innovation pathway. Not sure if it’s been thoroughly tested out in court, but why not, for some particularly generative innovations, open the gate for broad-scale exploration.
I’ve been applying share-alike licensing to most of my written and graphic (mostly facilitation-related) products, which permits use, modification, distribution with attribution, even for commercial purposes–with subsequent products expected to bear the same “share-alike” licensing. I haven’t done the research yet, but would be interesting to see which companies and kinds of companies are exploring this approach.

By: Deborah Mills-Scofield

Deborah Mills-Scofield — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:22:30 +0000

Too few companies realize that a strategic (vs. confining) approach to IP can serve as ‘honey to bees’ to attract innovation partners (customers, suppliers, other researchers etc.) – if you have a more open IP strategy, then those with valuable IP will be more attracted to come to you than to others (and yes, you may get approached with junk but…). The higher your IP walls, the more likely those looking for innovative approaches and sharing will have their IP bounce off your walls into a competitors hand.

By: Matt Perez

Matt Perez — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 12:46:22 +0000

You hit the nail right on the head. In an upcoming post, I concluded that “If your business requires you to do the patent thing, by all means go ahead and do that. Then hand it over to the lawyers and get quickly back to work on the next innovation that 1) will delight your customers and 2) catch your competition unawares.”

I think we would do wonders for our economy if we put a 10-year moratorium on Software Patents. If we still need them after 10 years, we can bring them back (but I doubt that we would).

Thanks for the reference to the Laursen and Salter study. I’m sure I’ll find use for it.