Last week I attended a seminar on open innovation and the impact on intellectual property at NESTA.  It inspired me to learn that innovation does not have to be a closed process in R&D labs, done purely for profit and competitive advantage.  There are many cases where companies are sharing their innovations openly as a way to encourage more good ideas that combine to even bigger breakthroughs and market opportunities.   Efforts like this are akin to the “open source” movement that started in high tech where companies share openly their software code to encourage others to innovate on the platform, thereby making the overall market opportunity larger and more accessible to more people. 

The problem has been that there were few legal options for sharing of copyrighted goods or materials.  Companies and individuals needed to simply share it and give up all rights, or keep it copyrighted with all rights to its use reserved, but limiting further innovation.  The old copyright legal designation is ill suited to the new world of the world wide web where sharing and innovation can flourish.  Now there is a very interesting Creative Commons framework that allows for an alternative to the old copyright system, offering a means to communicate and share whilst protecting rights. 

The Creative Commons approach is being used in some very interesting ways today, as in the case of shoe maker Nike and electronics retailer Best Buy who created an innovation programme to share their intellectual property with regard to environmental technologies they had discovered in product design and manufacturing supply chain.  Nike and Best Buy share their innovations under the new Creative Commons license instead of using the old copyright designation.  Now, any other business can access and apply these innovations in new ways thereby making a valuable contribution to environment protection.  At the same time, they use the version of the Creative Commons designation that limits uses to other industries so their competitors cannot simply copy these technologies.  By openly sharing their technologies, Nike and Best Buy are contributing the environment which is a valuable social responsibility programme, plus they save time and money as they don’t have to review each use proposed.

The Creative Commons is a real breakthrough in the legal framework to enable innovation.  The creative community now has a means to provide for when they want their music, video, or books to be freely copied, and when they do not.  And, the science community is even getting into the game with a new programme called Science Commons where academic works can be more openly shared online using a new standard xml mark-up language, that fosters more collaboration and sharing of research rather than locking up reports inside the universities or in medical journals.  The Science Commons is saving medical researchers much time as they can easily access past research.  Plus, it is contributing to improving the health of people in the developing world where researchers often do not have the resources to conduct such studies.