̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - intellectual property (IP)

Opinion: How an open approach to patents could help build a sustainable future

Anonymous — Tue, 16 May 2017 08:18:33 +0000

To sustain a population of 9.7 billion people by 2050 the world is going to need innovations that make careful use of the available resources, human and environmental. Key industry sectors such as energy, water, agriculture and transport are already under pressure to move to more sustainable methods of production and consumption. However, there are barriers in the way.

One of these lies in how the world manages the creation and ownership of inventions and ideas. A protectionist approach to intellectual property is designed to protect and prolong the lifecycle of existing technologies, and allow innovators to capture the profits from their creations. In a paper published with colleagues from universities in Germany and India, we examined how this also makes it harder for new and more sustainable technologies to be developed and adopted. That explains why there are now other approaches being used to move key sectors to more sustainable systems and end this status quo.

Electric car manufacturer Tesla, has been doing just that. Tesla CEO Elon Musk “shocked” the world in 2014 when he announced that his company was joining the open source movement and giving away its patents for free.

It is important to understand the rationale here. Why would a company that had worked so hard to develop and protect its technology from its global car manufacturer competitors suddenly give its technology away for free?

Switching track

Tesla initially developed a patent portfolio to protect its technology. However, Tesla’s concern that it would be overwhelmed once established car makers ramped up their production of electric cars never came to pass.

Instead, it saw the electric car market stagnate at less than 1% of total vehicle sales. So Tesla changed its strategy from trying to prevent others from building electric cars to trying to encourage them into the market.

Part of the reasoning here is that if more electric cars are built, then more battery recharging stations will be built too. This would make electric cars become more visible, and a more conventional choice. Tesla believes that an open intellectual property strategy can strengthen rather than diminish its position by building the size of the electric car market, and as a result, build its own share of the total automotive market.

This kind of careful management of intellectual property at company level, supported by policy-level awareness, can be a powerful way to support the same kinds of transitions to more sustainable technologies in other industries too.

Power companies need to adapt. Chiu Ho-yang/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA

Energy supply faces an array of difficulties: the depletion of natural resources; air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions; nuclear risks; and security of supply. ̽��ֱ��water supply sector is restricted by water scarcity, pollutants, extreme environmental events such as flooding and costs associated with supplying water to communities in poor countries and remote communities. ̽��ֱ��agri-food sector, meanwhile, is under pressure to sustainably produce more food and to address malnutrition in poor countries.

For these industries to navigate a path around these problems, new knowledge and the innovations that follow will be essential. And in knowledge economies, intellectual property can either be an enabler or an inhibitor.

Taking the medicine

If the ownership of intellectual property is fragmented in an industry, it can slow down technology innovation and uptake, such as in the electronics industry where multiple players own complementary patents. However, firms can instead open up their innovation processes and move away from jealously guarded, internal cultures, where intellectual property is used to protect and prolong lifecycles. This change may see knowledge sharing that leads to accelerated innovation cycles and a more rapid uptake of sustainable alternatives throughout a sector: just what Tesla was hoping for in electric vehicles.

This approach to intellectual property, so-called “open IP”, is well advanced and mature in the software industry and healthcare. It has given access to life-saving medicines to millions of people, particularly in developing countries through patent pools, such as the Medicine Patent Pool. This kind of project relies on multinational pharmaceutical companies sharing their intellectual property, but small companies can also play a strategic roles in creating these new, more sustainable systems, and it’s not all about open IP.

Plumpy'Nut is handed out in Kenya. DFID /Flickr, CC BY

As progress in technology is cumulative, there will always be phases of “closed IP” for small companies to build up their portfolio. This can also be a strategy designed to make a social impact. Take Nutriset, which manufacturers food for famine relief. It protects both its invention, Plumpy’Nut, and its entire business model by patents. Plumpy’Nut is a peanut-based paste for the treatment of severe malnutrition and can be administered at home rather than through a supervised hospital treatment. As a result it can treat more patients.

Nutriset says that it uses patents to enable the development of local production plants for Plumpy’Nut and to protect those in emerging nations from being taken over by global manufacturing sites in more developed countries. ̽��ֱ��local production of Plumpy’Nut helps with creating skills and employment in the regions where Nutriset’s product is most needed.

An open approach to intellectual property has clear advantages in popularising and establishing new and widespread sustainable technologies, but there is a rationale in some cases for sticking to the more traditional approach. ̽��ֱ��trick now is to discover when and where different sectors and innovators deploy each strategy. ̽��ֱ��grand open IP gestures in the mould of Tesla can force through rapid structural advances; a small peanut paste supplier shows that patent protection can still help put the building blocks in place.

Frank Tietze, Lecturer in Technology and Innovation Management, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

Are strict IP policies harming the development of sustainable technologies? In this article for ̽��ֱ��Conversation, Frank Tietze from the Institute for Manufacturing investigates how the open source approach taken by companies such as Tesla may help the economy and the planet.

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Announcement of the Prathiba M Singh Cambridge Scholarship

sj387 — Wed, 30 Oct 2013 03:05:51 +0000

After successfully completing her LLM and working for many years as a lawyer in India, Singh is now the managing partner of Singh & Singh Law Firm in New Delhi, started with her husband in 1997, something she never could have imagined when she was embarking on her Masters in 1992. She is now a registered patent and trademark attorney, with areas of practice including patent, trademark, copyright and design litigation, and hopes to help other young Indian students achieve their goals through this scholarship.

Singh, who completed her Bachelor of Law degree at Bangalore ̽��ֱ��, undertook a Masters of Law degree at Cambridge in 1992 on a full scholarship from the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust and then returned to India to work in Intellectual Property. This endowment, the Prathiba M Singh Cambridge Scholarship, will enable exceptional law students to follow in her academic and professional footsteps. A substantial part of her work consists of Intellectual Property disputes, and she is considered as one of India's leading IP litigators.

She has handled and argued a large number of landmark cases in India including the Novartis case. With more than 150 reported precedents to her credit, and achievements including the Euromoney Asia Women in Business Law Awards 2012 for the Best Woman IP Litigator in Asia, such a reputation is well deserved. Her firm has also been hailed as the Firm of the Year at the 2013 Managing IP Global Awards for IP Contentious work in India.

"This scholarship is the first step to make a contribution to the legal profession and give back what I got when I studied in Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. I hope meritorious Indian students avail this to do an LLM with focus on IPR laws and return to India. ̽��ֱ��purpose is to encourage young bright lawyers to join litigation practice."

̽��ֱ��Faculty of Law has long been known for the high quality of its teaching; since its foundation 700 years ago, when graduates would regularly attain the highest judicial positions in Europe, it has continually produced exemplary students of outstanding legal calibre.

Applicants for this scholarship should be talented students currently residing in India, in need of financial assistance to study at Cambridge, and intending to pursue a legal career in India after graduation. Because of Singh's professional specialisation, applicants must have a strong and genuine interest in studying Intellectual Property Law.

̽��ֱ��application deadline is 15th November 2013, for study in 2014-14. Visit the Faculty of Law website or the Cambridge Trust website for more information.

Prathiba M Singh, an Indian alumna of the Faculty of Law, has donated a scholarship that will allow other Indian students to complete an LLM at the world-renowned Cambridge Faculty of Law.

̽��ֱ��purpose is to encourage young bright lawyers to join litigation practice

Prathiba M Singh

Cambridge ̽��ֱ��

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Project aims to safeguard technology IP

bjb42 — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��two-year research project, called Technology Acquisition and Protection: ̽��ֱ��Links to Exploitation, is being carried out by the IfM's Centre for Technology Management (CTM).

Technology acquisition is the process by which a company acquires the rights to use and exploit a technology to improve products or services.

It has become a major issue to industry through the growth of Open Innovation projects in which firms develop new products and services based on intellectual property.

Intellectual property, relating to technology, software and design, can be worth millions of pounds to the company which developed it through licenses, royalty payments and patents.

If Open Innovation means that firms are sharing knowledge and technologies with a wider base of potential supply partners, there is a greater need to protect this intellectual property.

̽��ֱ��project aims to develop guidelines for technology acquisition and protection and will focus on early stage technologies where the need to protect intellectual property while identifying routes to commercial exploitation is paramount.

̽��ֱ��research is seeking to answer the following questions:

• What is the range of acquisition possibilities for firms wishing to access technological capability?

• What factors should be taken into account when deciding whether and how to acquire an early stage technology?

• What methods are there to protect the IP related to technology acquisition?

• How do decisions on IP protection influence exploitation routes (especially in the case of IP emerging from the science base)?

• How might these factors be combined in a decision support process for technology acquisition?

CTM will be staging a series of industrial workshops as part of the project, with the first expected in late October. ̽��ֱ��researchers are also seeking industrial partners to take part in the research.

To find out more please contact Simon Ford, sjf39@cam.ac.uk.

A new research project has been launched by the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge's Institute for Manufacturing (IfM) to investigate how firms can acquire new technology while protecting intellectual property.

It has become a major issue to industry through the growth of Open Innovation projects in which firms develop new products and services based on intellectual property.

Plinkk from Flickr

Microchip

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Proactive IP analysis: helping commercialisation not to (micro)drop out of sight

tdk25 — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Too often researchers discover that prospects for patenting and commercial exploitation of their inventions are compromised before they have even begun, either because they have prematurely disclosed the information or because ‘prior art’ exists that invalidates their application. What if researchers could instead build into their research process a review of the patent landscape at an early stage, rather than wait until issues are forced by the desire to publish? ̽��ֱ��IP position and commercial potential could then be used to inform strategic decisions about the direction of their research.

Cambridge Enterprise is working to do just this with Professors Chris Abell and Wilhelm Huck in the Department of Chemistry. With funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the Cambridge Microdroplets Project will be used as a test-bed for proactive IP analysis. A full analysis of the relevant patent space will be conducted, together with an exploration of the best criteria for identifying and protecting IP during the course of the project; business models for commercialisation that are synergistic with the research will then be built.

̽��ֱ��Microdroplets Project is ideal to model this approach to IP because of its numerous and diverse IP and commercial opportunities. Microdroplets – small water droplets generated in microfluidic systems – have the potential to act as individual reaction chambers in which discrete chemical or biological transformations can be conducted. ‘ ̽��ֱ��power of this discovery platform is that it offers the prospect of a completely new approach to experimental science by allowing quantitative analytical experiments to be carried out in a high-throughput way,’ explained Professor Abell.

Microdroplet research is developing rapidly and has strong international competition from the USA, Europe and Asia. ‘Understanding the patent landscape in any emerging field can inform the strategy for patenting and partnering for commercialisation,’ explained Teri Willey, Chief Executive of Cambridge Enterprise. ‘In this case, the intention is to optimise the value of the research results as the programme evolves. It represents a strategy by which dissemination of the results can be maximised in parallel with development of a longer term commercialisation strategy. In traditional approaches, these things have sometimes been mutually exclusive.’

This model builds on processes generally adopted in academic research and is one that may well become an exemplar as more IP-sensitive translational research is undertaken by the ̽��ֱ��.

For more information, please contact Cambridge Enterprise Ltd (email: enquiries@enterprise.cam.ac.uk; Tel: +44 (0)1223 760339;www.enterprise.cam.ac.uk)

An innovative new project spearheaded by Cambridge Enterprise Ltd and researchers in the Department of Chemistry is taking a proactive approach to intellectual property (IP) and commercialisation.

̽��ֱ��power of this discovery platform is that it offers the prospect of a completely new approach to experimental science by allowing quantitative analytical experiments to be carried out in a high-throughput way.

Professor Abell

Professor Chris Abell

Microdroplets

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