NESTA Connect

How should Universities manage Intellectual Property by 2020?

The UK's government department for innovation, universities and skills (DIUS) is working on developing a framework for higher education in the UK for the next ten to fifteen years to strive towards maintaining a world class education system in 2020. One of the big questions in the DIUS consultation is around intellectual property (IP). In fact the precise questions is “How should Universities manage IP by 2020, for their own benefit and for the wider economy”?

One hypothesis that underpins some of our work is that we need more outwardly facing academic communities, embodied perhaps by 'public intellectuals' who regularly engage with businesses, policy issues, current affairs, global challenges, or with experts in other disciplines. A couple of stories fresh in my mind from events in the last couple of weeks come to mind that I think are relevant.

• CERN carefully considered patenting the World Wide Web when it was created but its inventor Tim Berners Lee had to push hard to keep it free and open. Would the web have had the impact it has on our society and economy had they patented it? Almost certainly not.
• LEGO Mindstorms was hacked within a week of being available on the market, clrealy infringing LEGOs copyright. They had to decide to sue or support. They decided on the latter and, to cut a long story short, it led to Mindstorms being the most successful product range ever. So much so that LEGO now has shifted its perception of itself as a manufacturer of toys as a facilitator of fan-based networks.

Neither of these examples come from Universities, but what can we take from them to answer the DIUS question? Will universities shift their own perception of themselves as Lego did? How can we learn the lessons of the challenge faced by CERN in the late 1980's when Tim Berners Lee created the web? Interested, as always, in any views.

Users, Abusers, and Cross-Cutting Networks

I attended the launch of our latest report on User-Led Innovation yesterday. The event included contributions from a number of really interesting organisations/communities such as Sibelius, Swapits, and GBADev where it's the customers/consumers/users that do much of the innovation around their respective product ranges. What is interesting about all of these examples is how people are increasingly giving away their ideas for free, either to a) address a specific need, or b) for fun, or c) for kudos; or for some complex combination of all three.

The traditional approach to innovation is to protect your ideas and create economic value from them. And yet, as access to ideas or information becomes much easier, open and free, it is the networks or communities that will become the bedrock of innovative people and organisations, not the ideas themselves. And it will be our ability, as individuals or organisations, to innovate and create value through our networks and relationships, not so much our ideas.

However the great thing about networks is also their achilles heel. Namely that their value is widely distributed. This means that it is hardly ever in one person or organisation's interest to organise them. Also, organisations are often wary of facilitating communities as it can be easy to perceive them as abusing the brand or remit of the sponsoring organisation.

Therefore, if you accept some of the above, there is possibly a role for public sector support around more cross-cutting networks, or even a network of existing networks, as others typically don't have the time, money or incentive to set them up and run them. I think Nesta already does this to a small degree but how could and should we scale this up?

TBL and events, dear boy, events

It all came and went in a bit of a blur in the end.

Sir Tim Berners Lee came to Nesta yesterday to talk about the Future of the Web, joined by Charlie Leadbeater (Author) and Andy Duncan (Channel 4). The webcast is available here. I think he's the most important person we've had at Nesta in the 18 months. Nobody else has done more for innovation or collaboration in my view. And yet he was so down to earth yet clearly very passionate about his subject even though he must talk about it publically nearly every day.

It also formed the launch of a project which we are supporting called the Web Science Research Initiative. It quite rightly seeks to study the web as a complex system in it's own right. It's at a vague but exciting stage right now and feel excited about the prospect of being part of it.

I didn't particularly enjoy the event in the end, mainly as I was somewhat preoccupied with observing other peoples thoughts via the twitter backchannel. For me, incorporating twitter was a partially successful experiment and one we can build on, but I'd rather be listening in future. I was however rather delighted to be able to ask a question on behalf of a chap in Iceland.

Others have criticised the panel and discussion format, however I think it's always a very tricky balance between the big themes and big name speakers (which draw people in) and the more detailed discussion and intimacy that we also want. In restricting Tim's talk, we aimed to give more time for discussion but in hindsight I think some people, myself included, would prefer to have just basked in the presence of a great innovator and heard more from him without interruption. However it was, as with everything else, an experiment, from which we will learn continue to play around with.

Tim said something about not underestimating the potential of humanity connected, and it is that very un-british, ambitious and optimistic note upon which I'd prefer to focus on.

Our hopes and fears for the future of the web

Come 2gether08 right now

I really enjoyed 2gether08 last week. A festival focussed on exploring the positive social potential of technology. The buzz was palpable and it was great to be involved and participate. Steve Moore has an uncanning knack for collecting interesting people and bringing them together. I don't know how he does it and I suspect he probably doesn't either but we can learn a lot from simply bringing together a smart and passionate group of people, and creating the space for them to collaborate. For those who missed it or want to get a flavour of what it was all about, take a look at some of the various videos/content expertly documented by David Wilcox and others here, http://2gether08.com/. Let's build on this momentum.

Collisions, combinations and collaborations

I have nearly finished the book The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. It's a very easy to read business book on 'intersectional' innovation and is full of great examples which are very relevant to a lot of the work we do at NESTA Connect.

In particular it has some very simple descriptions of why the intersection of fields are more innovative (because of the exponential increase in possible combintions of ideas), the importance of specialism verses generalists (both needed of course), and the sorts of skills and metrics that help and hinder these approaches (punish inaction not failure, and the section on incentives and motivation is very relevant but I won't go into it here).

The whole field of interdisciplinary collaboration/research is much talked about, especially in academic circles, but in my view has become too wooly and nebulous to really impact on our institutions. Therefore, I welcome the almost brutally simple approach the author takes to explaining why intersections are important and how they can be created.

Less is More?

When the wonders of digital media meet a billion people with interests and passions, good things can happen.

Have you seen the Hitchockwiki yet? It's a collaborative effort to build the world's largest resource on all things Hitch.

While no substitute for watching the films, I was struck by the site's 1000 Frames of Hitchcock project. Jean Luc-Goddard, the great disruptive film maker, once said that "Cinema is the truth 24 times a second". Being able to search, view and enjoy single frames from some of my favourite movies proves that some innovations are about getting new value from existing pleasures. I was struck by the beautiful colours in Vertigo.

Madeleine Carrol's stockinged leg anyone?

Jon