2007-01-21 Innovation Metric

Patents used as an innovation metric ? where is the alternative ?

The patents are often used as defensive tool against other aggressive patenters. Red Hat is registering patents in order to keep a portfolio against other companies playing unfair (if you can really play fair in the patent system but it's another discussion) in the software business. They keep the promise that they won't enforce their patents against software licensed under a free software license. The term "protection" is often used in the patent system but it's not often for protecting your invention but mainly to protect you against the potential racketeer.

Beside the "racketeer" protection, there is a very common use of patent : the innovation metric. A classical argument in favor of patent is to have such system to evaluate the innovation level of a company, a country or a region. The number of patent application is used to build dozen list of most innovative countries or the most favorable area in the world where investor should put money… Of course, we all know that only relying on the patent applications to build a kind of innovation index is a very truncated view where and when innovation pops up. Investors often relies on the capacity of a start-up to fill patents before doing large investment. Start-ups may have done a lot of research in development in a product or a service without having the ability to fill application. But you have other ways to evaluate the innovation level of start-ups like the number and the respective quality of scientific publications/papers, the various legal depots of copyrighted works, …

Evaluating innovation in a company based on a single factor like the patent system is dangerous for everyone including the investor. At a time where the society ask for more accountability inside the companies, we really need a better system to evaluate innovation. Of course, there is no miracle. There is no such thing like the perfect innovation index. But at least, we should start to think of a better solution. My first thought was that we don't need such metric as they are all broken. That's true but it looks like that the economical sector loves to use broken metric. If there is no alternative in the "innovation metrics", the economical sector will pick the only one available and it's clearly the broken one . It's maybe time to propose something else ?

Some random ideas to build such index :

• We shouldn't rely on a single factor
• We should rely on factors that could be easily audited by independent parties
• We should not discriminate companies or a specific factor
• The index is highly dynamic (monthly based ?)
• The index is public as long the company wants to participate
• The index is composed of all the factors (version of the index may changes following the changes of the factor)

Some potential factors (of course, they are all broken but not in the same area) :

• Scientific publication rate
• Scientific publication quality (based on known conference? editor? reviewer?)
• Patent application rate
• Research ratio commitment compared to the number of employee (must be accounted in the balance sheet)
• Registration of copyright rate
• Registration of copyright quality
• …

Maybe there are already some other indexes… I just think that the idea well worth investigating, at least to avoid the current single factor used : the patents.

Tags: copyright innovation patent metric

2007-01-21 Net Neutrality

I was following a little bit the long discussion about net neutrality and found this quote from Tim Berners-Lee about net neutrality :

Anyone can build a new application on the Web, without asking me, or Vint Cerf,
or their ISP, or their cable company, or their operating system provider, or 
their government, or their hardware vendor.

This quote summarizes really well what net neutrality is. There are a lot of discussion saying that this is not a problem when an ISP provides a differentiation regarding the services you access on the Internet. I think it is. The ISP has the role to provide you an access to a public network nothing more or… less. We don't want to get back to the old ages where there were Compuserve, a fidonet network, MSN and sometimes a wacky gateway to the Internet from those proprietary networks. We just want plain routed IP packet on the Internet…

Update 2007-01-23 : I'm not against traffic engineering in the ISP backbone. I'm just against the idea to have different kind of access depending of the agreement of the ISP made with various service provider. Imagine that you have your ISP giving you a fast access to live.com server engine but not to the google search engine. It's not a matter of law (Net Neutrality will not be solved by the legal framework), it's just a matter to keep the access to a public network. At the end, we must keep a free market when providing access to the public Internet.