Wulf editorial

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Cameron Wilson <wilson_c () hq acm org>
Date: June 5, 2007 5:23:15 PM EDT
To: USACM () LISTSERV ACM ORG
Subject: FW: Wulf editorial
Reply-To: Cameron Wilson <wilson_c () hq acm org>

Hi -- Good piece by Bill Wulf on innovation and public policy.

Cameron
--  
Cameron Wilson
Director of Public Policy
Association for Computing Machinery
1100 Seventeenth Street, NW
Suite 507
Washington DC 20036
202 659-9712
www.acm.org/usacm

------ Forwarded Message
From: "Michael A. Waring" <mwaring () umich edu>
Date: Tue, 05 Jun 2007 17:04:21 -0400
To: "'innovationtaskforce () cra org'" <innovationtaskforce () cra org>
Conversation: Wulf editorial
Subject: Wulf editorial

Editorial
Changes in Innovation Ecology
William A. Wulf*


Globalization has introduced both uncertainties and opportunities  
worldwide.
In the United States, a flurry of recent books and reports has told the
country how to be competitive in the 21st century, from Thomas L.  
Freidman's
The World is Flat, to the National Academies'Rising Above the Gathering
Storm, and at least a dozen more. All note the historic strength of the
United States in innovation and suggest that reinvigorating this  
capability
is key to future prosperity. The resulting recommendations relate to an
"ecology" of interrelated institutions, laws, regulations, and policies
providing an innovation infrastructure that entails education,  
research, tax
policy, and intellectual property protection, among others.  
Unfortunately,
this ecology is more fundamentally broken than is generally recognized.

It's broken for two reasons. First, its components were created in the
context of old technologies, not new or future ones. Second, our  
processes
for updating them are incremental, and we don't stand back and ask  
whether
our changes are achieving the intended outcomes. It isn't obvious, for
example, that a patent system created for macroscopic physical  
machines is
ideal for computer software, snippets of DNA, or business processes.  
A year
ago, 30 Silicon Valley chief technology officers told me that the U.S.
patent system was irrelevant to the original Constitutional intent to
encourage innovation. Although their fast product cycles make them  
skeptical
about decadal protection, their reaction shows that a system invented  
for an
old technology won't necessarily fit a new one.

Also seemingly antiquated is a Web page with the copyright symbol ©  
on it.
That page was copied, in its digitized form, at least a half dozen  
times on
the trip from its server to the screen; indeed, it would have zero  
value if
it hadn't been copied. Of course the author didn't mean to prohibit  
those
copies, but they are indistinguishable from the others that the  
author did
mean to prohibit. Ironically, we must break this law to achieve one  
of its
primary objectives. The notion of prohibiting "copying" to protect  
artistic
and literary creativity made sense when those values were expressed in
physical media, but it makes no sense in a digital world.

A serial medical entrepreneur pointed out to me that the nation's gold
standard of randomized double-blind clinical trials to ensure drug  
safety
and efficacy simply doesn't work for therapies that are tailored to a  
small
population of patients, an emerging trend in drug development. In those
cases, a traditional clinical trial will lack the statistical power  
to reach
a conclusion. It will surely be ironic if a mechanism intended to  
protect us
has the effect of preventing access to more effective drugs.

The antitrust laws are important for innovation. They create spaces  
in which
small innovative companies can compete. Unfortunately, those in the  
United
States were written in an era when scarcity usually determined economic
value. In some fields today, it's ubiquity that sets value. For  
example, if
I have the only telephone in the world, it has little value.  
Conversely, I
use Microsoft software primarily because its ubiquity maximizes the
probability that I can exchange documents with someone else. It  
shouldn't
surprise us that laws based on assumptions that worked in a traditional
industrial economic setting don't work perfectly for new technologies.

Although many commentators are ready to accept or even praise the  
loss of
U.S. manufacturing to low-wage countries, production and marketing  
experts
indicate that the future of manufacturing is not mass production, but  
mass
customization. The key will not be the capacity to make a zillion  
size 101⁄2
D
shoes (my size), but manufacturing shoes to suit Bill Wulf's size,  
color,
and style preferences. This is a knowledge-intensive business; one in  
which
we are well equipped to compete. But we need the right institutional and
policy ecology to do so.

In each of these examples, the policy goal is still valid: protecting  
the
public from unsafe or ineffective drugs, for example. It's the
implementation that needs to be updated, and that can't be done
incrementally. To prosper, we need an international process that can,  
time
after time, fundamentally rethink the elements of our innovation  
ecology.



--

Michael A. Waring
Executive Director of Federal Relations and
Director of the Washington Office
The University of Michigan
499 S. Capitol Street, SW, Suite 501
Washington, DC  20003
202-554-0578 (office)
202-554-0630 (direct)
202-257-9961 (cell)
202-554-0582 (fax)
mwaring () umich edu



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