We have a strange habit of treating good ideas like buried treasure. Find one, stake a claim, surround it with lawyers, and make sure nobody else gets too close. That makes sense if the goal is to extract as much value as possible from owning the idea. It makes less sense if the goal is to actually solve a problem.
An idea sitting behind a fence isn’t innovation. Innovation happens when somebody builds the thing.
That distinction matters to the Institute for the Painfully Obvious because the Institute isn’t intended to become a warehouse full of intellectual property. If we identify a problem and develop an idea that might solve it, the goal should be to get that idea into the hands of people capable of doing something with it.
That means, whenever practical, the ideas themselves should be open.
An Idea Isn’t a Business
One of the assumptions behind this philosophy is fairly simple: having an idea and successfully executing an idea are two very different things.
I have ideas all the time. Some are probably good. Some are probably terrible. Occasionally I won’t know which category one belongs in until I’ve spent entirely too much time thinking about it. But even a genuinely good idea isn’t automatically a viable product or business.
Someone still has to engineer it. Someone has to manufacture it, host it, maintain it, finance it, market it, support it, improve it, and convince other people that it is worth using. Those are not minor details that happen after the “real” innovation has occurred. They are a huge part of the innovation.
If five companies start with exactly the same idea, there is no reason to believe they will produce five identical products. One might build the technically superior version. Another might make it cheaper. Another might make it easier to use. Someone else might figure out how to manufacture it at scale, integrate it into existing systems, or provide better customer support.
That is competition. And I’d argue it is a healthier form of competition than simply fighting over who gets to own the original idea.
We Have Seen What Happens When Ownership Gets in the Way
Since I’ve already established on this site that I am perfectly willing to disappear down a radio-related rabbit hole (example #1, example #2), early radio provides a surprisingly useful example. By the time the United States entered World War I, radio technology had developed through the work of numerous inventors and companies. Important parts of a functioning radio system were covered by different patents controlled by different organizations.
The result was exactly the kind of mess you might expect. Companies fought over patents. Lawsuits became expensive. Different manufacturers controlled different pieces of the technology.
Then the United States entered a world war. The government had a much more immediate concern than determining which company had the strongest patent portfolio. It needed radios. Wartime government intervention pushed manufacturers and patent holders toward cooperation so equipment could actually be produced. After the war, the industry continued moving toward cross-licensing arrangements that allowed companies to use technologies controlled by other companies. Wikipedia: Patents and licensing in early radio.
The history is more complicated than simply saying the government “opened all the patents,” but the lesson is useful. When control over individual pieces of an idea becomes more important than building the complete system, innovation can become a coordination problem.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that we don’t know how to build something. The problem is everyone is too busy arguing over who owns which part of it.
Open Doesn’t Mean Nobody Makes Money
This is where discussions about open ideas can go off the rails. Arguing that an idea should be open is not the same as arguing that nobody should profit from it. Businesses should make money.
People who take risks should have opportunities to benefit from those risks. Engineers should be paid. Developers should be paid. Manufacturers need margins. Investors need reasons to invest. Companies need revenue if we expect them to continue operating and improving their products.
The Institute’s philosophy isn’t anti-business. If anything, it asks businesses to compete on the part they are supposed to be good at: execution. Imagine that the Institute publishes an idea for solving a particular problem and five companies decide there is a market for it. Good. Let all five try.
Maybe one builds an inexpensive consumer version. Another targets enterprise customers. Another develops an open-source implementation and makes money providing support and hosting. Another discovers that the original idea was wrong in some important way and builds something better. The Institute doesn’t need to decide which one deserves permission to try. The market, users, communities, and the quality of the implementations can sort that out.
Open Ideas Can Create Bigger Ecosystems
There is another advantage to this approach. When a useful idea or standard is open, businesses don’t necessarily have to build everything themselves. One company can specialize in hardware. Another can build software. Someone else can provide hosting. Another organization can develop tools that work with all of them.
Instead of one organization owning the entire system, an ecosystem can develop around a shared foundation. We already see versions of this throughout technology.
The Internet wasn’t built around one company owning the exclusive right to create an Internet service. The Web didn’t require every website owner to negotiate a license with the inventor of the hyperlink. Open-source software routinely serves as the foundation for profitable businesses.
The openness of the underlying idea doesn’t eliminate commercial opportunity. It can create more places for commercial opportunity to exist. And it gives users something else that proprietary ecosystems frequently don’t: choice. If one implementation becomes expensive, stagnant, hostile to its users, or simply bad, the underlying idea still exists. Someone else can try to execute it better.
The Institute Doesn’t Need to Own Everything It Thinks Of
This brings us back to what the Institute for the Painfully Obvious is supposed to be. The Institute isn’t intended to become another organization whose primary measure of success is the size of its patent portfolio.
Its value should come from finding overlooked problems, researching them, bringing different disciplines together, and developing ideas worth pursuing. If one of those ideas can become more useful by being freely available, putting a fence around it simply because we can would work against the mission.
That doesn’t mean intellectual property has no legitimate purpose. There will be situations where patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, or other protections make sense. There may even be future Institute projects where some form of intellectual property protection is necessary to make the project viable.
This isn’t an argument for abolishing intellectual property. It’s an argument for changing the default. Instead of asking: How do we protect this idea? Start by asking: What happens if we let everyone use it? If the answer is that more people can experiment with it, improve it, build businesses around it, adapt it to problems we never considered, and ultimately increase the odds that the original problem gets solved, then perhaps ownership isn’t providing much value.
The idea can be open; the businesses can compete on execution.
Then Who Actually Builds It?
There is an obvious problem with everything I’ve just written.
Publishing an idea doesn’t make it real. A beautifully researched document sitting on a website is still just a beautifully researched document sitting on a website. Someone eventually has to build something.
That raises a much harder question for the Institute: how does an idea move from something we think should exist to something that actually does? That’s the next painfully obvious problem.