Prizes not patents are best way for African universities to innovate, get money and demonstrate excellence.
Some African universities are considering investing money, energy and political capital in pursuing patent strategies based on the 1980 Baye-Dohl legislation in the United States. However investing in decades old, pre-Internet, Reaganomics may cause them to miss the global trend towards awarding prizes rather than patents for innovation.
For universities especially African universities prizes are far better than patents:
– the winner gets the money faster;
– the award is worth far more than money, it also confers prestige which is very important to institutions to attract talent;
– knowing whether you have won or not in a specific time frame helps decisions to terminate research that is not going anywhere;
– because its not necessary to go through the long, costly and uncertain process of taking a product to market.
I’ll talk a bit about each of these advantages in another post. There is a growing global trend towards the use of prizes to stimulate innovation. While even big pharma which has traditionally relied on patents is increasingly using prizes intermediaries ho have made money from the Baye-Dohl legislation; patent lawyers, associations of university technology transfer officers are intent on selling the Baye-Dohl model to Africa.
Prizes are being offered by both non-profit foundations and for profit corporations. The X-Prize Foundationoffers prizes for automotive innovation, genomics and aero-space, for as much as $30 000 000.00. Innovation Prize Central details twenty five prizes offered by businesses and non-profit organisations.
What is driving the trend towards prizes? The papers for a conferenceon medical prize funds being held in Maastrecht on the 28th and 29th of January 2009 provides some of the answers.
Taking innovations, especially pharmaceutical innovations to market is an incredibly complex business, requiring control of, or at least guaranteed access to manufacturing and distribution systems. Researchers and research centres which don’t already have those channels have little financial incentive to engage in research and innovation if they will be unable to access markets. Prizes however lower the barriers to entry, enabling many more researchers to participate, since the research itself, such as the isolation of a novel pharmaceutical compound is rewarded. Depending on the conditions of the prize the results will then be open to any manufacturer to produce, or where the pharmaceutical company has offered the prize it will itself produce the drugs.
The advantage of prizes over patents is that while patents grant monopolies, prizes make use of the essential requirement of free markets, competition. A pharmaceutical company which urgently requires breakthrough treatments is no longer confined to its own R & D department but instead creates an incentive for others to solve the problem, while providing the market expertise itself.
Governments use prizes to create incentives for innovation in important areas, 2009 should see a large number of government sponsored prizes for new energy technologies, and cleaner uses of old ones. Instead of trying to centrally control the will o wisp of inspiration through command driven research governments can simply offer prizes for innovation in areas of public interest whether reducing carbon emissions or devising TB inoculation, and allow competitive forces to efficiently produce results.
Those who are normally sceptical of government interventions have no cause for complaint.
When governments are forced to bail out entire industries, as the United States government has had to do with the automotive industry, then spending lessor amounts to provide incentives for new energy technologies which will reduce reliance on price volatile fossil fuels through competition between researchers, cannot be regarded as interference in the market.
In the current financial crises governments are turning to Keynesian economic policies, including increased government expenditure on investment to drive economic growth. The benefit of prizes is that they represent not only an injection into the economy but that the secondary effects of the injection, an increase in knowledge and innovation, benefit everyone.
African universities anxious to obtain third stream funding, raise their profiles and retain talent should keep their eyes on the prize.
