Science in the Triangle

Call it ingenuity, right-brain thinking or out-of-the-box problem solving - what sparks ideas goes by many names. The Chinese, the Egyptians, the Incas, the Italians, they all had it and the results fill museums, theaters and libraries.

Americans had it, too, but two years after we triggered a global recession we’re worried that we lost it.

No wonder a forum Monday and Tuesday on how we can get our juice back in the 21st century sold out, drawing hundreds of people to the Raleigh Convention Center. An interesting question that popped up again and again at the Emerging Issues Forum was whether proprietorship stifles innovation.

“We need to move from an ownership society to a leadership society,” proclaimed Michael Tiemann, vice president of open source affairs at Raleigh-based software company Red Hat. Open source software allows free access to the lines of code, essentially the brains to the hardware’s brawn.

Tiemann believes that open source software works better, because it is constantly updated and improved by a wide variety of programmers. More than half of the proprietary software is delayed coming to market or has serious bugs, he said.

His answer seemed unequivocal: Control stifles creativity. Ownership breeds defects. Many heads are better than one.

Others have raised the same question in their own words. Author Elizabeth Gilbert in a Ted Talk asked whether creative genius is something that comes from us or something that comes through us. Daniel Pink, an author and one of the speakers at the Emerging Issues Forum, in a Ted Talk said research of what motivates us shows that money rewards dull thinking while autonomy stimulates it.

The Internet, born in the U.S. Department of Defense about half a century ago, was arguably the most powerful innovation of the 20th century. The Web created a digital world that transcends culture, geography and class. It also brought about open source software and companies like Google, which reaps huge financial rewards by giving its employees autonomy.

Indeed, many painters, writers and actors are creative because they aren’t part of an organizational chart. But the most creative idea doesn’t pay the bills unless you stick a price tag on it and somebody pays for it.

Many technological and medical innovations and the many years of expensive research they require have been possible because of patents, which are basically claims of ownership. Thomas Edison had a patent for the light bulb. So did Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone, George de Mestral for velcro and Gertrude Elion for leukemia-fighting drugs, to name a few.

The pharmaceutical industry, which could use a dose of innovation, has restructured its drug research groups into ever smaller entities to promote creative thinking. With little to show for their efforts, large drugmakers are now cutting R&D costs and increasingly raiding the laboratories of smaller biotech companies.

Are the concepts promoted by open source believers like Tiemann and career analysts like Pink transferrable to drug research, or even publishing, another struggling industry? Or do we need some creative new business models, too?

There seem to be more questions than answers.

Sure, Red Hat bought Cygnus Solutions for $674 million in 1999, a decade after Tiemann said he cofounded the open source company with about $6,000. But how many right-brain thinkers like Pink and Gilbert can demand large speaker’s fees?

Creative Commons, whose vice president Michael Linksvayer spoke on the same panel as Tiemann, is a nonprofit. Creative Commons aims to boost creativity by providing tools that, as Linksvayer put it balance protection of the inventor’s rights with public access. Wikipedia operates on a license provided by Creative Commons, so does Lulu.com, a Raleigh-based company online publisher.

Lulu.com is reportedly eyeing an initial public offering of stock in Canada worth about $48 million. And how does the online publisher create that much value? By charging authors, the right-brain thinkers who add to the marketplace of ideas.