Open Innovation for Renewable Energy
This is extremely good news, and thanks for Ryan Lanham to alert us to this Worldchanging article:
U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu makes the case for open innovation in clean energy:
“Since power plants are built in the home country, most of the investments are in the home country,” he said. “You don’t build a power plant, put it in a boat and ship it overseas, similar to with buildings. So developing technologies for much more efficient buildings is something that can be shared in each country. If countries actively helped each other, they would also reap the home benefits of using less energy. So any area like that I think is where we should work very hard in a very collaborative way — by very collaborative I mean share all intellectual property as much as possible. And in my meetings with my counterparts in other countries, when we talk about this they say, yes, we really should do this. But there hasn’t been a coordinated effort. And so it’s like all countries becoming allies against this common foe, which is the energy problem.”
Commentary from World Changing’s Alex Steffen:
“This is an incredibly important and poorly understood idea. I also believe that in an era which may see a decline in material globalization and at least something of a return to localized production, adopting open IP becomes paradoxically more important in creating competitive advantages.
That’s because I think a greatly increased amount of free innovation is inevitable, both because of the forces driving commons-based/crowd-sourced/open source solutions in general, and because the vast majority of the world’s potential users for anything can’t afford to pay developing world rates. If something’s going to spread, it’s going to spread because it’s cheap, easy to use, and readily modifiable. In such a world, a creative advantage is a competitive advantage: that is, being able to add special value at the top end, rather than commodity information value, is what makes a business work.
And people who embrace open informational substrates have an advantage here. That in turn requires an embrace of the commons, in architecture, energy and everything else. That’s the way to save the planet. It’s also the way to save the economy.”
April 3rd, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Dear Michel,
here are two articles concerning patents & IP, from engineering perspective:
http://www.embeddedtechjournal.com/articles_2008/20080729_patent.htm
http://www.fpgajournal.com/articles_2008/20080819_ip.htm
BTW, saw you today in Kiasma. Thanks for a good representation!
In contrast to some other representationers’ extreme dogmatism,
your vision delighted me as both idealistic (in a positive sense, that there
are ideals to strive for, not just cynicism!) and realistic at the
same time, i.e. you show the path leading to there, giving examples
how similar transitions have happened before.