Innovation, Property, and Openness

Ideas have the most value when more people use them. But to encourage people to create new ideas — medicines, music, software, dance — they need to be able to feed themselves and their firms by charging others for using the ideas. That is, they need to restrict who can use the idea. This creates a conundrum: we maximize value through sharing but without benefit to the creators we will not get the ideas in the first place. The conundrum becomes particularly acute where, to create the idea in the first place, you need a lot of different people to contribute to the idea; in other words, you need sharing.

This lecture will examine the conundrum and how to address it. Intellectual property (IP) provides one strand of the answer by limiting who can use ideas so that idea creators have funds to create. By itself, however, IP undermines the sharing necessary for the creation of new ideas and to ensure the maximum benefit of ideas. We need a counterbalance. Open science (OS) — the open sharing of ideas and lack of restrictions on the use of ideas — provides this counterbalance. Understanding how to combine IP and OS is critical to the development of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, the software the underlies the Internet, and drug development to prevent the next health crisis, as well as ensuring that society receives the maximum benefit from those ideas.



Professor E. Richard Gold is a Distinguished James McGill Professor at McGill University’s Faculty of Law, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, and Bieler School of the Environment. He brings 35 years of academic, policy, and private-sector experience to his research on intellectual property, innovation, economic growth, and open science. He is the Director of McGill’s Centre for Intellectual Property Policy (CIPP), Chief Policy and Partnerships Officer at Conscience, and Co-Principal Investigator on TRIDENT (an interdisciplinary project building an open preclinical platform to test the cognitive effect of drugs. With training in law (LL.B [Toronto], LL.M and S.J.D [Michigan]) and computer science (B.Sc. [McGill]), he integrates technical, business, and legal expertise to investigate how law interacts with other social systems shaping innovation outcomes.

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