CambridgeIP

"Ilian presenting at the CSD workshop, 'The Costs and Benefits of Renewables: Biomass'

There is a need for innovation and industrial upgrade policies to be co-ordinated with renewable energy capacity obligations for Bulgaria and other accession member states to the EU: that was the main message of a presentation by CambridgeIP’s CEO Ilian Iliev at a recent workshop on The Costs and Benefits of Renewables: Biomass organised by the Center for Study of Democracy in Sofia, Bulgaria.

For smaller EU member states who are also dealing with the legacy of the financial crisis it can be politically and economically very costly to allocate the resources needed for a transition to a low-carbon energy economy. The worst approach would be one of ‘box ticking’ – doing the minimum possible to meet EU renewable energy obligation targets. Ilian emphasised the need to link-up the disparate areas of energy system regulation, industrial and innovation policy. In that way the required resource commitments to meet EU renewable energy obligations can support broader targets for value chain migration of the domestic industry, migration of the domestic economy towards greater energy efficiency and higher value-added by the domestic economy.

Last week PIRA International interviewed Quentin Tannock (Chairman, CambridgeIP) ahead of the NanoMaterials 2011 conference (London, June 2011).  Read below for Quentin's responses on a range of topics including: Open innovation in nanotech; Challenges and opportunities in pushing out nano materials R&D into industry; Fostering relationships across the disparate end-use sectors of nanotechnology.

> A lot of people talk about open innovation - do you see a lot of these type of collaborations in the nanotech sector?

My view is that success in nanotech, especially for the smaller players and research institutes, is increasingly about succeeding in 'open innovation'.  This noted, the frequency of open innovation activity including collaborations seems more dependent on culture in the target industry sector than on the type of nanotechnology being deployed.

On 11 April 2011, I  presented at the London Metropolitan Business School Energy Day 2011 event on ‘The Role of IP in accelerating innovation and diffusion of renewable energy technologies: business practices and policy options’. To find out more about the event, please visit our events page.

Intellectual property rights (IPR) are thought to encourage innovation by providing inventors with the correct financial incentives to innovate.  Generally, IPRs reward inventors by protecting their right to control and decide who may use their inventions, how they will be used, and, importantly, to charge for such use.  This theory is supported by a vast body of empirical data showing a strong relationship between increased R&D efforts and inventiveness, and patenting trends.

Jean-Paul Sartre said that “Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance”. The same seems to be as true for the majority of patents, as it is for French existentialists. But unlike the latter, patents gain both raison d’etre and intrinsic value when others cite them: recent academic research suggests patent forward citation rates are the single most reliable proxy for patent value. Prof. Bronwyn Hall of UC Berkeley and her colleagues investigated the market value of patents and R&D for a sample of 1,060 EU medium to large companies.

Governments need to develop 'smart' intellectual property policies and regulations that take into account technology sector diversity. As I noted in the Wall Street Journal recently, current intellectual property policy and regulation tends to be of the ‘one-size-fits-all variety’ unsuited to the sector diversity covered. This blog provides examples from CambridgeIP research into the Low Carbon Energy, Nanotech and Biotech spaces illustrating some of the challenges facing policy-makers and highlighting some of the reasons why the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach fails.

Julian Hitchcock of Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP contributed this guest blog entry:

The grant of a patent for induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) in the United Kingdom in January and the notice issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office in February allowing claims under a US patent application entitled "Methods for Reprogramming Somatic Cells" signal a significant new feature of the stem cell patent landscape. But don't imagine that stem cell patents are about to become straightforward.