EDFix Call #6 afterthoughts: Cutting Holes in the IP Funnel

John Wilbanks from Science Commons and Kelly Lauber, Director of Nike's Sustainable Business & Innovation Lab, joined us on the February 8th EDFix call to discuss the GreenXchange project, which was announced at the World Economic Forum in January.

Highlights from the call included:

• an explanation of the new patent tools that GreenXchange will provide, including a research non-assertion pledge to encourage more non-profit research on commercial patents and and a model patent license which inverts the traditional patent and allows reuse of the technology.
• a discussion of a "3rd layer" of language to allow constraints on top of the model patent license. These constraints would allow a patent-owner to share the patent with exceptions (e.g., not with direct competitors).

Wilbanks explained these interventions as "cutting holes" in the intellectual property funnel so that knowledge to generate innovation will leak out to other organizations that might put it to work, while preserving the IP originator's rights.

GreenXchange is beginning what will be a multi-year process with release of the legal language. The next steps are to recruit more or the right early partners, study what leaders like Nike are doing with their patents, and build a network. Wilbank's goal is to add a zero to the number of companies using GreenXchange every year.

One of the surprising insights, via Lauber, is that Nike's legal team was a champion, not opponent of this new approach. She explained that their team had already been looking at open innovation and saw the upside that GreenXchange offered. She says that Nike is particularly pleased by the research opportunities that have been created and sees a huge opportunity.

Wilbanks echoed Bill Joy's observation that most of the smart people are outside your company. Once the IP community has a standard infrastructure in place for searching and using patents across companies and even industry sectors, network effects can kick in. That's the goal for the next few years.

Listen to or download the podcast of the full discussion (43 min.) or Jerry's summary of the call (9 min).

Be sure to join upcoming EDFix Conference Calls.