Propertization

Before proceeding further, I’d like to take a minute to talk about propertization. By propertization, I mean something akin to the enclosure movement as it applies to fundamentally open things. Ideas, for example, can be propertized through patents and copyrights (“intellectual property”). Advertising slogans and tag-lines (brands) can be propertized through trademarks. This propertization can be described as necessary and proper to incentivizing innovation. Similarly, wireless spectrum is propertized in America (the idea being that if you pay for it, you’ll use it wisely and in the most economically rational way – in principle for the benefit of the American consumer).

However, propertization carries risks, and there is an alarmingly strong argument against it. The premise behind propertization is that when you’re tackling a particular problem, it’s your problem to solve. You are an entity with a vested interest in a particular industry or field, and you want to solve a problem in that field and sell the solution.

In other words, propertization, in some contexts, views whatever is being propertized as an end in and of itself, instead of a means to a larger end. In my own line of work, I see this happen a lot. Individuals and groups develop novel solutions to small problems and sit on them. The incentive is there for people to sit on them until they can use them to rush to the rescue in solution of some problem. However, adding these small solutions to a repository of knowledge and incentivizing everyone to add to the repository obviously creates the optimal environment for rapid development.

This is my particular version of “the innovator’s dilemma”.  That is to say, society as a whole benefits the most when innovators share their results with everyone (and charge people for products, not ideas), but the cost of developing an idea is so great that no-one really wants to share it with anyone once they’ve done it.  Companies are moving towards open source development models (indeed, mega-corporations such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and the like have contributed tremendously to open source projects such as Eclipse and OpenOffice.org, and Google routinely releases source for new projects such as the Chromium Web Browser), but the economics always favors closed development over open development.

I don’t know what a good solution to this might be.  One possible solution might be to establish “protected commons” domains.  Within such domains, intellectual property is literally considered to be the joint property of the participating companies or people.  Companies agree to contribute a given percentage of their gross revenues (or a certain minimum amount of cash-equivalent) in R&D work to the domain, and also to not compete with other companies within the same domain.

With this type of structure, small companies can band together to produce remarkable results, but also (in the unlikely event of their demise) ensure that their work products can be used by other companies.  Indeed, this may be the only way in which it actually becomes cost effective for small and start-up businesses to perform R&D in certain areas.  Since so many companies “apply” the same or similar technologies to different problems, this type of structure would also incentivize creation of open standards and aggressive adoption and development of BoB technologies.  Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, this type of structure would ensure that no company wastes time unnecessarily replicating work performed by others which is available within their particular commons domain.

One obvious potential problem with this type of protected commons domain would be that if two companies within the same protected commons agreement attempt to pursue the same avenue of development (towards the same product).  The only reasonable arrangement if neither company currently occupies this particular market space is that the two companies develop the product in the commons and then form a joint venture to market the product.  Since this would be by far the most sensitive part of any such domain, it may even be reasonable to make a condition of membership that no companies can enter new market spaces after joining the domain, and require that companies form spinoffs, offshoots, or joint ventures to pursue new areas of expansion.

The “protected commons” may also be the savior of capitalism as we know it (despite the obvious analogue to the socialist farm cooperative).  In today’s innovation economy, small start-up companies (which have the drive to pursue truly innovative areas of research and development) have very high barriers to developing certain capital-intensive technologies.  (While almost any company these days can reinvent the wheel when it comes to software, though it may waste significant amounts of time doing so, development of novel hardware may simply be beyond the reach of many small businesses, despite excellent ideas and good business models).  Technology sharing domains in which manufacturing techniques, component designs, and approaches are shared across multiple companies mitigates risk inherent in such development and speeds innovation by providing companies the opportunity to accelerate innovation in one market space by using technologies developed “for” another.  Aside from such domains, the only hope for rapid technological evolution lies with large companies, which are neither agile enough to adapt to rapidly changing market conditions nor truly incentivized to do so.