iBRIDGE CONVERSATION

The iBridge Network is leading the North American Group of The Knowledge Vine, a networking system that has been operating very successfully since October 2006, starting in the UK, but progressively expanding to over 35 countries internationally. It is simple, powerful, informal and free.

Similar to a standard list-serve, the system is equivalent to “word of mouth”; it connects university technology transfer professionals, consultants, technology investors, patent agents, industry professionals and SME support professionals connected with commercializing intellectual property.

The Knowledge Vine is a proven, effective tool that gives professionals in this sector easy access to the experience, knowledge or contacts of others in the community. Users have been surveyed twice on the effectiveness of the system. The overwhelming response was that the relevance, quality and speed of of the replies were extremely high. Users also get great value out of seeing the questions as it encourages connections when synergies are identified:

• “I have tested the network with my first question. It is wonderful! I got 7 answers in an hour! Thanks!”
• “On the occasions I have used the network, I have found that the leads I have been given have been very useful and have come through promptly”
• “The Knowledge Vine gives a simple and easy solution.”

How it works

To use the system, users write a request in the form of a single sentence question to a central email address for the members of the group. The request email is then immediately forwarded to group members. If someone on the network has the knowledge or information you seek, they will reply directly back to you by email. When posting a request to the group, users typically receive 5-15 replies, sometimes even more, either with the information that they need, or suggesting whom they might be able to contact for the answer.

Some typical questions:

• Does anyone have a good contact for technology licensing at Philips Semiconductor?
• Does anyone have any good licensing agents/broker contacts in Taiwan or Japan?
• Does anyone have any IP for protein manufacture, as we have some IP we are looking to strengthen or bundle with?
• Does anyone have any market data or market trend information on the blood glucose testing market?
• Does anyone know a good market research specialist in teh environmental sector?

The Rules:

1. Only one sentence allowed - this forces the requester to communicate very clearly
2. The sentence must be a question
3. Only reply to the person making the request (no one else cares!)
4. No offers, promotions, or advertising

The rules make the service distinctly different and much more effective than other email and web-based tools. Because of the simplicity of the postings, the only traffic users see is occasional single sentence emails in their in-box. Because they are written in a very clear communication style they are easy and very quick to read.

How to join

You can join directly at www.TheKnowledgeVine.net - just register on the site, activate your account, and then browse and join the group. The site hosts a number of other technology-related Knowledge Vine networks, all openly accessible to you and resulting in a large set of other free knowledge resources. You can access other groups (e.g., Australasia, UK and others) simply by posting an email to the appropriate email address; you DON’T need to join other groups to get value out of them!

The North American Group is being lead by the iBridge Network, and supported by UMIP (The university of Manchester Intellectual Property Ltd).

For further information contact:

Laura Paglione
laura@iBridgeNetwork.org

Congratulations to our friends over at Science Commons who have been written up in Popular Science magazine this week! I love hearing John Wilbanks talk about why it should be easier to share and find scientific information even if you aren’t immersed in that particular field. If you have never heard or read anything from him, I would suggest for you to read the article.

As you may know, the iBridge Network is working with Science Commons on their Material Transfer Agreement project which provides a wide array of standardized licenses including the Uniform Biological Materials Transfer Agreement (UBMTA) and the Simple Letter Agreement (SLA) in addition to several standard ones developed by Science Commons. Standardized licensing of research materials happens today, though it may not be as common as one would think. We are expecting with the additional of several other standardized licenses, and the ease of specifying them (through Science Commons tools), and ease of attaching these licenses to research descriptions in the iBridge Network will help fuel use of standardized agreements for more situations.

We are expecting to have standardized licensing up on our site by the end of the summer and already have a couple of our university members who are planning to participate as early adopters! We’ll keep you posted!

I was just reading the president’s letter from the May 2007 edition of the HHMI Bulletin published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In it, Thomas Cech summarizes the conclusions of a National Research Council committee in which he chaired in 2003. The committee was charged with taking a fresh look at the responsibilities of scientists to share the data and materials referenced in original research articles. They developed a concept that they called UPSIDE which stands for the Uniform Principle for Sharing Integral Data and Materials Expeditiously.

Howard Hughes Medical Institute has long required their investigators to share their published research materials to the extent possible. In fact, their policy on sharing these materials is transparent and broad. Their policy states that they will share materials within 60 days from request, which includes the negotiation of a Material Transfer Agreement (MTA). It contains specific terms for materials, data & databases, and software. It also clearly states the responsibilities of those requesting these materials, all of which seem reasonable to me.

While I haven’t read many statements by research institutes on their policy for sharing materials, given the way that I often hear MTAs discussed I suspect that not many research institutes require their investigators to share. Yes, it can be a burden to prepare, list and license materials, though with new tools like the iBridge Network, the Science Commons MTA standardization and others this burden is becoming lighter every day.

Nobelist Max Perutz has noted that, “True science thrives best in glass houses, where everyone can look in.” True science also benefits when research articles and materials are freely available after publication. Given the huge benefit to science and future discoveries, I hope that the recent successes by iBridge members in sharing materials in a low-transaction cost manner are just the tip of the iceberg in helping to fuel future innovation and discovery.

I welcome your comments on the subject of openness:
info@iBridgeNetwork.org

Salesforce.com’s Mark Benioff has come up with an idea that is being billed as “Incubator 2.0″ by BusinessWeek.com. As recently reported by BusinessWeek, Benioff last month launched a business incubator within his own company.

The purpose is to bring in startups under one roof and let them at the task of helping build new software solutions for Salesforce.com. The companies invited in get no financing from Benioff and they pay rent (about $20K annually), but they get some traditional incubator services, including watercooler networking with fellow innovators and no worries on office space.

All of this seems fairly unique in the annals of corporate support for R&D of new products and applications. To be sure, there are many who don’t believe business incubation is all its cut out to be, but Benioff’s move certainly is worth tracking in the months ahead. 

The Community Patent Review (CPR) Peer to Patent Project, an initiative of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, is inviting people involved in the law and technology world to participate in an important product beta-test.

The product, developed in conjunction with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, is an online platform designed to open some patent applications for public-expert (”peer”) review. The followup aim is to help patent examiners make better (possibly faster) decisions on granting patents.

For more detailed information on the mechanics of all this, check out this Washington Post article from last March.

In regard to the beta-testing, it’s by invitation only. Send an email asap if you’re interested in participating to info@peertopatent.org. 

Once you’re accepted as a beta tester, you’ll receive a login and password to access the beta site. Beta testers will be asked to review every nook and cranny of the site. And time is tight for this stage of the project. Testing period runs through the end of this month. Launch is scheduled for June 1.

You also can pre-register to be a community patent reviewer in advance of the June 1 launch. 

Question for the day: how many federal dollars currently flow to U.S. colleges and universities for science and engineering research? The answer is $29 billion — up nicely from $17.5 billion in 2000, according to data from the National Science Foundation.

So you might presume the American people would want a solid ROI for all of this public investment in basic research. But how do you fairly define what this ROI is? Is it about university licensing revenues, companies formed, numbers of patents? Or is it also about ensuring a fast and fluid flow to the public of broad “knowledge diffusion” (such as networks, research tools, new equipment) along with breakthrough inventions? 

These questions, more or less, are at the heart of a new report from the Kauffman Foundation, Commercializing University Innovations: A Better Way. In a nutshell, this report argues that university innovation can be moved to the market faster if university tech transfer offices shift their program emphases from licensing/revenue to a “volume model” (based on quantity of innovations moved out the door).

The report offers four ways (or perhaps some combination thereof) this dynamic could happen: free agency among faculty, regional alliances among schools, Internet-based approaches (such as iBridge Network), and faculty loyalty (e.g., giving back via donations to the institution). 

Along this line, The News & Observer (Raleigh, NC) offers balanced coverage of the report, including some substantive feedback from officials at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Once in a while, a major rankings and policy report comes out that becomes a must-read (in part because the rankings are by turns comprehensive and laser-like in their focus and the authors enjoy respected reputations). And so it is with The 2007 State New Economy Index (full disclosure: the Kauffman Foundation cosponsored this report) prepared by Dr. Robert D. Atkinson and Daniel K. Correa, both with the Washington, DC-based Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

This report, which has appeared twice before in 1999 and 2002, is a sprawling affair and covers nearly every nook and cranny in regard to how the U.S. states rank relative to their technology, innovation, and entrepreneurial assets. 

For this post, rather than focus on the rankings exclusively, it may be more of interest to readers here to see what Atkinson and Correa say in regard to universities relative to technology transfer and entrepreneurial activity across the 50 states.

On this front, Atkinson and Correa proclaim that “innovative capacity (derived through universities, R&D investments, scientists and engineers, and entrepreneurial drive) is increasingly what drives competitive success in the New Economy.” And when it comes to understanding how to evaluate properly economic growth in a state, the authors offer the reminder that it’s not about job creation — instead, it’s about per capita income. And the driver for growth in this metric is “innovation, not [by] capital accumulation.” 

In regard to colleges and universities and their respective state economies, the authors make several pointed recommendations focused on how to build dynamic innovation and entrepreneurial-based economies. First, they urge states to “enhance the role of colleges and universities” in spurring regional innovation and growth. “Between 1991 and 2004,” say Atkinson and Correa, “the number of patent applications filed by United States universities increased from 13.7 applications per institution to 57.8, licensing income increased from $1.96 million per university to $7.06 million, and new university-based start-ups increased from 212 in 1994, to 462 in 2004.”

In addition, the authors urge states to match their investments in their universities to prevailing state industry clusters. The report also recommends universities create programs to develop and recruit “star” scientists (”more than 90 percent of of the most significant university R&D is performed by just 10 percent of the faculty”) as well as urges states to “focus on commercialization of research” out of its university-based labs (and cites Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center and the Iowa State Innovation System as good examples of programs that spur connections between researchers and industry).

As the AUTM 2007 Annual Meeting roars along through this weekend in San Francisco, a new white paper simultaneously has been released that should be of interest to all involved in technology research and commercialization.

The paper is titled In the Public Interest: Nine Points to Consider in Licensing University Technology, and was authored by a collection of technology transfer directors at some of the U.S.’s leading reseach universities (including Cal Tech, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford).

For a good overview of what’s contained in this report, take a look at this week’s SSTI Weekly Digest. Among the report’s contents, according to SSTI, is a nine-point set of principles for how university technology licensing should be undertaken today, and includes recommendations such as “(e)xclusive licenses should be structured in a manner that encourages technology development and use.” 

Recently I had the opportunity to attend the Designing CyberInfrastructure Conference, at the National Academies in Washington DC.  There I saw how and where the iBridge Network fits into the building of the nation’s cyber infrastructure (CI).

From Peter Freeman, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) to Stuart Feldman of IBM to Brett Frischman of the Loyala School of Law at the University of Chicago to Steve Jackson of the University of Michigan, the support for a strong cyber infrastructure in this country is undeniable. The energy at the conference was exciting and made me think more about how the iBridge Network fits into this CI world.
With the iBridge Network there is now a new gateway for industry and entrepreneurs to engage in conversations about how policy, legal, and usage possibilities affect the CI design and the need to involve all the stakeholders in the design process.  This involvement helps build a stronger, more powerful gateway.

NSF hopes that CI will serve as an agent for broadening participation and strengthening the nation’s workforce in science and engineering. To enable this, NSF’s goal is to provide a CI that is secure, efficient, reliable, accessible, usable, and interoperable that will evolve into an essential part of conducting science and engineering research  The iBridge Network already supports this goal by making technologies and innovations are available for license and use to researchers, entrepreneurs, and industry.

I was amazed to see that the Network is also supporting one of the recommendations of the National Innovation Initiative Report on Intellectual Property. The report discusses the need to facilitate long-term technology transfer relationships between universities and industry, a founding principle of the iBridge Network.  Additionally, the iBridge Network provides unrestricted access through its one-stop shop e-commerce capabilities that allow users to search, browse technologies, contact researchers, and license the technologies, thereby supporting the CI tenant of lowering transaction costs and increasing opportunity for free exchange.

Overall, I couldn’t believe all the synergies between the iBridge Network and the CI that is being built now and into the future. Talk about good timing for the launching of the Network!