Duke’s IP Conference

I had the opportunity to attend Duke’s Second Annual Conference on Intellectual Property yesterday. I was there for a Panel on “Impediments to Technology Markets: What are they, and what can firms and government do?” and a keynote on “Collaborative Innovation”.

The panel was quite interesting and insightful. There were so many good ideas being thrown around I decided to pull up the IdeaBahn platform to start live idea capturing. I was surprised at how easy the new UI and layout is when you quickly want to jot down the different concepts.

In any case, IP is an area of interest for me personally because I struggled with these concepts as I was refining IdeaBahn’s value proposition. There is a balance between free for all ideation (completely open crowd sourcing) and ownership of those ideas. Ideas, those especially that have the potential for monetization or commercialization fall into this pot. Kluster, a startup that launched at TED earlier this week is attempting to openly crowd source ideas and I really do wish them luck.

I do not believe the frameworks, tools and the mindset are present in the majority of the market to make a “market for IP” or “market for ideas” successful today. That does not mean it’s never going to work, it means there are number of paradigm shifts that need to happen before IP is freely traded, manipulated and  valued. I’m certainly glad to hear that shifts like this a finally happening in Fortune 500 companies, but there is a lesson to be learned for smaller companies as well. If we adopt this mindset from the start, there is more to be gained through collaboration than hoarding of information.

Some of the key impediments that I jotted down (food for thought):

1.      Resistance – it comes from unexpected places and people do not want to be responsible for their inaction.

2.      Transparency – there is no simple way to value the IP. Sure there is a market when a buyer and seller meet, but there is no systematic way of determining the intrinsic value.

3.      Risk and Fear – giving up control to IP that may come back to hound if it’s wildly successful in the hands of someone else.

4.      Liquidity – there isn’t enough liquidity to create a sustainable and perpetual marketplace.