Gerry Canavan reports on a talk at Duke entitled “The Decline of the Anti-Commons”, by Christopher Newfield.

Excerpt:

“The talk explored two alternative models for scientific innovation. The first, the dominant model in our moment, is the linear paradigm that employs limited public funds to generate privately held intellectual property within a market context. When innovation is privatized, the question is not whether socially valuable technologies are being developed but whether property interests are being maximized. Contemporary neoliberal ideology views patent-based corporate entrepreneurship as the maximal path to progress; IP is viewed as the natural, best, and even only bridge between laboratory invention and public use. However, recent evidence suggests that multiplying the number of patents is in fact not actually the same thing as progress; reports indicate that U.S. competitiveness is beginning to decline even as patents increase, with Newfield arguing that the contradictions inherent in the current IP paradigm are the cause of this slowdown.

The second model is more speculative, even Utopian. Rather than (as with patent-based innovation) keeping the government in the role of “dumb money” to be minimized and edged out once profitable IP has been developed, the Lyon paradigm for innovation begins with the expression of widespread social need that might be ameliorated by “targeted moonshots” of massive public investment. Such research would be conducted under open-source principles with an aim towards industry-community partnership, with innovation driven not by market forces but by continuous democratic social dialogue. Rather than innovating through the market, then, this is innovation through the common; this model of innovation would not only produce more socially responsible and more environmentally just technologies, Newfield believes, but it would also be more efficient than IP-focused research insofar as it would focus on longer-term considerations than the short 18-to-24-month turnaround on profitability.

Newfield’s case study was the failure of the solar market in the 1970s, which despite massive top-down effort during the Carter administration to innovate still only constitutes .1% of the U.S. energy market. To avoid repeating this earlier failure, Newfield calls for new social narratives of industry-public cooperation designed to stimulate public interest in solar investment: two key pillars in this new frame will be telling the public “This time it will be for you” and “You need to make us make it for you.”