Global Innovation Commons

The Global Innovation Commons (G.I.C.) provides a world-wide repository of public domain innovations shared under the GIC Framework license.

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More Affordable Wind Power for Virginia

Dominion Virginia Power put its offshore wind power project in Virginia Beach on hold this week due to prohibitively high estimated costs. Public domain patents could help lower those costs and get the Commonwealth's green energy plans back on track!

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Desert Agriculture in the Navajo Nation

Arid climate agricultural technologies to help increase access to healthy foods in response to recent initiatives by the Navajo Nation Council and the Diné Community Advocacy Alliance.

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There’s a new post up on our GIC blog featuring sets on green energy options in response to President Obama’s announcement of a new investment initiative for the region at the U.S.-CARICOM summit last week in Jamaica.

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In commemoration of World Water Day, we’d like to highlight our compilations of public domain innovation related to Water.  These are publicly-disclosed ideas, in the form of patents, that are open for anyone to use in many places around the world.  Use the interactive map to see what’s public domain in the country or countries that you’re interested in.  If you see something that interests you, check out our Global Innovation Commons (GIC) framework to learn how to participate!  Our Water technology categories cover:

Potable Water

Renewable Power Desalination

Water Dispenser

Water Filtration

Water Irradiation and Reverse Osmosis

Water Pumps

Water Storage Containers

Water Testing

We also have public domain technology sets on topics in Agriculture, Clean Energy, and World Health so there’s a little something for everyone!

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The Perils of Microcredit - Development or Debt?

Microcredit refers to the practice of providing small loansto non-traditional borrowers.  The loans, usually no more than a few thousand dollars, are provided by microfinance institutions (MFIs) to individuals and groups who do not have access to traditional bank loans because of financial or geographical barriers.  Many microcredit borrowers live in rural areas and most lack the collateral required to get a loan from a bank.  The practice drew more attention in 1976, when Bengali economist Muhammad Yunus founded Grameen Bank, the first MFI.  

In recent years, microcredit crowdfunding has proliferated, with sites like kiva.org using the internet to link borrowers and lenders.  On most of these sites, however, the loan is not transferred directly from lender to borrower, but instead is actually disbursed by a local partner MFI.  These operations have overhead costs that they cover by charging interest on the microcredit loans.  

Even those microcredit platforms that do not work with interest-charging partner institutions face a serious fundamental challenge to their effectiveness and appropriateness. This is the difficulty of communicating realistic information about a borrower’s productivity.  Without this knowledge, a lender simply cannot know the appropriate amount to lend.  Although the internet allows for direct communication between the two parties, there are typically language and cultural barriers that can impede understanding and, most importantly, the lender is usually not an expert in the borrower’s business.   

Microcredit crowdfunding is not confined to the internet.  In January, 2015 President Barack Obama and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced the Indian Diaspora Investment Initiative. The idea behind the initiative is to give Indians and people of Indian descent living outside of India a way to invest in small- and medium-sized enterprise in India.  To this end, the program will create interest-bearing notes that investors can purchase which will fund up to $10 million in loans through local partner banks. In this case, the interest rates charged must be high enough to cover not only the overhead costs to the banks but also the interest payments to investors.

The problem with the microcredit model is not that the borrowers fail to repay their loans, but that the loans often fail to have the intended effect, which is to build economic capacity and foster long-term, sustainable growth.  A recent report from The Guardian cited a 2013 study conducted by the Cambodia Institute of Development which found that many microcredit borrowers in Cambodia were juggling multiple loans to stay afloat and sacrificing basic necessities in order to make loan payments.

Credit is a tool that can be used to great effect, but only when it is employed in context and within a framework that accounts for all of the elements actually present in a system. Without this grounding in a borrower’s economic reality, a credit system is more likely to become a debt system than to achieve any long-term transformation.

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The GIC Framework

In keeping with the Global Innovation Commons (GIC) being a repository of public domain knowledge disclosures, the GIC itself operates under a licensing framework which has just a few simple rules:

If you use information from the GIC, you must share what you're doing with everyone else.

If you improve on information found in the GIC, you must share your improvements with everyone else.

Finally, the use of any GIC information must reference the "Global Innovation Commons".

The purpose of the GIC framework is to facilitate the equitable and open exchange of knowledge and value.  In return for providing access to our global patent repositories, all the GIC asks is that you act as a member of a global community by acknowledging what you use, what you do with it, and where you found it.  

Read more about how to use the GIC and how it works at these two links: 

http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/content/using-gic

http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/content/global-innovation-commons-framework

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Last month, John Green posted a vlogbrothers video summarizing the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's annual letter "Our Big Bet for the Future" (read it here: http://www.gatesnotes.com/2015-annual-letter) and addressing the question "Will life get better for the poor?"

Here at the Global Innovation Commons, we know that the answer to this question is a resounding yes, but we also recognize that more relevant and more radical changes can happen much sooner when problem solvers around the world have access to an abundance of knowledge.  

We're happy to direct you to this abundance of knowledge in the form of our repositories of public domain innovation on technologies that address several of the topics John mentions here, including dracunculiasis (Guinea Worm disease), onchocerciasis (river blindness), Malaria, and agricultural technologies like fertilizers.

You can check out all of our sets of public domain patents related to Agriculture, Clean Energy, Water, and World Health by visiting us at: http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/

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WTO Least-Developed Countries Request Waiver Of IP Rights On Pharma Products

This week at the World Trade Organization intellectual property committee meeting, least-developed countries submitted a request to extend a waiver allowing them not to enforce intellectual propert...

Should the enforcement of patent protection for pharmaceuticals depend on how developed a country is according to a set of rigid criteria?  

You may notice by looking at our sets of public domain patents on World Health that Western pharmaceutical companies often don't actually apply for international patents in the markets where their products are the most useful. 

The USPTO's Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) is currently wrestling with where to draw the line on the patentability of pharmaceutical and biotechnology subject matter, which will impact what types of treatments can receive patent protection in the future.  

Whatever the legal state of pharmaceutical protection may be, the Global Innovation Commons' repositories of public domain innovation are an alternative resource for public health problem solvers around the world.

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Ghana's Intellectual Property to be reviewed -

The Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mrs Marrieta Brew Appiah-Oppong on Wednesday said the country was modernising its intellectual property regime to

Ghana is looking for ways to increase its citizens' access to and utilization of innovative technologies.  The country is participating in the World Intellectual Property Organization's (WIPO) Technology and Innovation Support Centers (TISC) program.  

We would like to offer the Global Innovation Commons as one option that people looking for solutions in countries like Ghana can participate in under a collaborative, communal, public domain framework.  

Policymakers determining what the IP regimes of the future will look like can benefit from an awareness of alternatives that may be more relevant to their country's context and internal goals.

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Hydro power and desalination

In blog posts over the past few weeks, we've talked about hydroelectric power and desalination challenges. Here are two interesting projects that are finding some new ways to implement these technologies. Thanks to our friend Meredith Wouters for the tips!

Wave-powered electricity and desalination in Australia:  http://www.sciencealert.com/world-s-first-grid-connected-wave-power-station-switched-on-in-australia

Gravity-enabled hydroelectric generation in Portland:  http://magazine.good.is/articles/portland-pipeline-water-turbine-power

If you missed our GIC blog entries on these topics, find them here!

Solar Energy and Sustainable Desalination in the Middle East:  http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/blog/solar-energy-and-sustainable-desalination-middle-east

Energy Diversification in Zambia:  http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/blog/energy-diversification-zambia

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Treating Drug-Resistant Malaria in Southeast Asia

On February 20, 2015, NPR News reported on a recent study conducted by doctors at the Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit in Bangkok.  The study discovered an increasing incidence of malaria resistant to artemisinins, an important class of antimalarial drugs.

The study focused on Burma (Myanmar), but this type of drug resistance has been detected in several countries in Southeast Asia.  NPR’s Jason Beaubien reports that a major concern is the proximity of these drug-resistant strains to India, where widespread resistance to artemisinins would pose a serious challenge to the effectiveness of currently-available malaria treatments.

The impact of artemisinin resistance is not yet fully apparent because the drug is often used in conjunction with other drugs in artemisinin combination therapies (ACTs).  Longer-term efforts to mitigate resistance will require the development of new alternative drugs. In a recent Q&A, the World Health Organization stated that “the spread or independent emergence of artemisinin resistance in other parts of the world could pose a major health security risk as no alternative antimalarial medicine is available at present with the same level of efficacy and tolerability as ACTs.”

The Global Innovation Commons has compiled repositories of public domain innovation containing knowledge that may be useful in exploring alternative antimalarial therapies for Southeast Asian nations experiencing artemisinin resistance.  The information contained within these disclosures is in the public domain in the countries of interest and open for use by anyone under the Global Innovation Commons framework.  Our sets include over 2,000 public domain patents related to malaria treatment and prevention in each of Burma (Myanmar), Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

You can view all of the GIC sets on Malaria by country here: http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/malaria

 Sources:

Beaubien, Jason. “The World Could Be On The Verge Of Losing A Powerful Malaria Drug.” NPR News. 20 Feb. 2015. http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2015/02/20/387533918/the-world-could-be-on-the-verge-of-losing-a-powerful-malaria-drug

World Health Organization. “Q&A on artemisinin resistance.” February 2015. http://www.who.int/malaria/media/artemisinin_resistance_qa/en/

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Farming and Foreign Aid in Haiti

Last fall, over 20 film directors participated in the shortfilm initiative “WE THE ECONOMY,” a series of bite-sized looks at common but important questions people have about economics.  

One of these films, “The Foreign Aid Paradox”, created by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, took on the subject of how the United States provides humanitarian aid to other countries. Grady and Ewing’s film highlights the example of Haiti, which between January, 2010, when the country experienced a massive earthquake, and September, 2014 had received over $3 billion in aid from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) alone.

Grady and Ewing interview Haitian farmers who express a desire for aid that includes capacity building, like improved farming tools, rather than the current model, which Haitian Deputy Minister of Agriculture Michel Chancy calls the “dumping” of surplus US food commodities into Haiti.  Although the effects of the 2010 earthquake have threatened Haiti’s food security, the food aid the country has received is only a short-term solution to hunger.   

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) cites damaged and overworked irrigation systems and lost supplies of seed as major causes of Haiti’s current food insecurity.  To not only rebuild but develop its agricultural capacities beyond pre-earthquake levels, Haiti needs access to knowledge and technology. Fortunately, the nation already has that access through the public domain patent repositories of the Global Innovation Commons (GIC).  

The GIC has identified over 2,500 patents related to Irrigation technologies that have no legal protection in Haiti.  Over 250 patents covering technologies for Erosion Control and Management, a major concern in Haiti, have no legal protection there.  Additionally, the patent portfolios of multinational agriculture firms contain many assets related to seed with desirable traits, including flood resistance.  For example, Monsanto holds over 420 patents without protection in Haiti on submergence resistance genes for plants including corn, an important food crop in Haiti.

Follow these links to view the complete GIC sets by country for technologies related to:

Irrigation – http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/irrigation

Erosion Control – http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/erosion-control

Erosion Management – http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/erosion-management

Sources:

Grady, Rachel and Heidi Ewing. The Foreign Aid Paradox. WE THE ECONOMY. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwN5dbMMkv4

United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. “Haiti earthquake 2010.” FAO in emergencies. http://www.fao.org/emergencies/crisis/haiti-earthquake-2010/en/

United States Agency for International Development. “Fact Sheet: U.S. Assistant to Haiti Overview for 2010-2015.” http://www.usaid.gov/news-information/fact-sheets/us-assistance-haiti-overview-2010-2015-december-2014

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Off-grid Solar Power in Rural India

From February 15-17, 2015, India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy hosted the first Renewable Energy Global Investors Meet & Expo (RE-Invest) in New  Delhi.  The event is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s plan to dramatically increase renewable energy investments in India, setting a target of $100 billion to be invested in solar power alone by the year 2022.  The government hopes to increase the nation’s solar capacity to over 10% of its total energy production in order to provide power to more citizens and reduce dependence on coal and other polluting and non-renewable fossil fuels.

NPR News also reported on February 17 that India’s large rural population, living in small towns and villages not connected to electric grids, sees solar as a key component of its energy future.  Where electricity is unavailable, residents most often rely on burning wood, kerosene, or biomass for light and vital tasks like cooking.  The fumes from these materials are harmful to both the environment and to people, causing major health problems among those exposed to them over time. Solar has become a popular alternative option for those rural residents who can get photovoltaic panels or products like SELCO Solar India’s $200 solar generator.  

The Global Innovation Commons (GIC) contains repositories of public domain innovation that can contribute to India’s quest to be producing at least 100,000 megawatts of solar power just seven years from now.  The GIC has recorded nearly 9,500 patents with no legal protection in India which contain knowledge useful for developing and implementing solar energy technologies.  These technologies are public domain and open for anyone to use in India under the terms of the GIC framework.

View the GIC’s sets on Solar energy by country here: http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/solar 

In light of the RE-Invest expo, SELCO Solar India’s chairman, Dr. H Harish Hande, told NPR’s Julie McCarthy in an interview that “India’s rural poor are not looking for sympathy; they are looking for a partner.”  The Global Innovation Commons makes transformative technologies accessible by connecting abundances of knowledge with people around the world who seek to solve problems of scarcity.  Working under this framework, anyone can be a partner to anyone worldwide. 

Sources:

Busvine, Douglas and Tom Hogue, ed. “India’s Modi raises solar investment target to $100 bln by 2022.” Reuters. 2 Jan. 2015. http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/02/india-solar-idUSL3N0UG13H20150102

McCarthy, Julie. “Solar Energy May Light The Way For Villagers Not On India’s Grid.” NPR News. 17 Feb. 2015. http://www.npr.org/2015/02/17/386876116/solar-energy-may-light-the-way-for-villagers-not-on-india-s-electric-grid 

Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Government of India. “About RE-Invest 2015.” RE-Invest. http://www.re-invest.in/Content.aspx?Id=6

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Ebola and Hunger in West Africa

On February 12, 2015, the World Bank Group announced $15 million in financing to supply record amounts of staple crop seed and fertilizer to the nations most heavily affected by the recent ebola virus outbreak: Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.  The funds will come from grants supplied by the World Bank Group’s International Development Association (IDA) and its Ebola Recovery and Reconstruction Trust Fund.

The ebola epidemic has impacted food security, as many affected rural communities have struggled to keep up with growing and harvesting schedules.  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that nearly half a million people in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia will be food insecure by the end of March, 2015.  Meanwhile, the number of ebola cases in these countries has continued to rise, with over 260 new confirmed cases since the beginning of February.  

The World Bank’s press release states that the grants will “help lay the foundations for sustained recovery.”  Long-run, transformative efforts to improve public health and food security must include locally-driven implementation of the publicly-available knowledge contained in the Commons.  Tapping into public domain innovation allows for significant cost savings compared to purchasing solutions from markets in which those technologies are protected by intellectual property (IP) enclosure systems. 

The Global Innovation Commons contains repositories of public domain innovation with the potential to have a transformative effect on West Africa’s ability to manage disease and food security crises.  The GIC has assembled sets of public domain innovation covering a variety of technologies useful in global agriculture, including conventional and organic fertilizers, biodigesters which can be used to convert agricultural waste into compost or fertilizer, drought-resistant growing aids, herbicides and fungicides, and pest control technologies.

View all of our GIC sets for Agriculture by country here: http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/category/agriculture

Opportunities to contribute to the research, development, and implementation of ebola therapies and vaccines exist in the patent portfolios of multinational pharmaceutical firms, university research foundations, and private research labs. Over 3,700 pieces of innovation useful in ebola treatment research exist with no legal protection in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the rest of the African continent, making them available for use by the public in those jurisdictions.

Sources:

World Bank. “New World Bank Group Push to Revive Agriculture, Avert Hunger for over One Million People at Risk in Ebola-hit Countries.” 12 Feb. 2015. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/02/12/world-bank-group-revive-agriculture-avert-hunger-one-million-people-risk-ebola-countries

World Health Organization. “Ebola Situation reports.” 11 Feb. 2015. http://apps.who.int/ebola/en/current-situation/ebola-situation-report

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Blog: The Transformative Power of the Commons

On February 11, 2015, NPR News highlighted a report issued by Lawrence Berkley National Lab’s Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies.  The report lists 51 technology “breakthroughs” that the authors believe would have the greatest impact on the lives of people in marginalized regions of the world, with a focus on south Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

In addition to identifying these technologies, the Institute analyzed the feasibility of implementing each one by considering factors such as the role of public policy, access to financing, infrastructure, distribution channels, and existing business models.  The authors of the report see the attractiveness to investors in industrialized markets of commercializing these technologies as a key consideration in their estimated deployment timelines.  Because of this, they identify philanthropic grants as the only possible source of funding for some of the 51 technologies.

Here at the Global Innovation Commons (GIC), we seek to align abundance with need through the equitably-accessible reservoir of human ingenuity that is the Commons.  By recognizing abundance in the form of innovation where it is already open for use, we can shift the paradigms of technology deployment and global “development”.

The GIC has assembled sets of public domain innovation relevant to a number of the report’s 51 listed breakthroughs, including:

    “A new method for desalination: scalable, low cost, and using renewable energy;

     Vaccines that can effectively control and eventually help eradicate the major infectious diseases of our time—HIV/AIDS, Malaria and TB;

    New methods to produce fertilizers to replace current processes, which are extremely capital intensive and have significant environmental footprints;

     Affordable herbicides or other mechanisms to control weeds, ideally ones that are more environmentally friendly than herbicides currently on the market;

    New seed varieties that are tolerant to drought, heat, and other emerging environmental stresses;

     Suite of solar photovoltaic mini-grid components, to significantly reduce upfront costs;

    Low cost (under $500) transport for families, ideally using renewable energy.”

Follow these links to view the full GIC sets by country:

Renewable Power Desalination -http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/renewable-power-desalination

Malaria - http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/malaria

Fertilizer - http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/fertilizer

Herbicides/Fungicides -http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/herbicidesfungicides

Drought Resistant Technology -http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/drought-resistant-technology

Solar energy - http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/solar

Be sure to visit our homepage at http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/ to explore the full breadth of the four GIC Categories.

Sources:

National Public Radio. “The 50 Most Effective Ways To Transform The Developing World.” Morning Edition. 11 Feb. 2015. http://www.npr.org/blogs/goatsandsoda/2015/02/11/385396431/the-50-most-effective-ways-to-transform-the-developing-world

LIGTT, 2014. 50 Breakthroughs: Critical Scientific and Technological Advances Needed for Sustainable Global Development. LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies, Berkeley, CA, USA. https://ligtt.org/sites/all/files/page/50BTs-List.pdf

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What is Integral Trade®?

Integral Trade is an open-source certification that may be used by any member of the community who affirmatively assents to all of the values of Integral Trade.

Our Values Are As Follows:

● Conflict and Oppression Free All extraction, processing, and production must be conducted with the consent of the persons who participate in the stewardship of their local resources and are free from duress and free to choose their mode of engagement.

● Ecologically Sound All steps in the extraction, processing, production, and logistics value chain must evidence active steps to transition from polluting to clean methods with corresponding direction given to the cradle to cradle lifecycle repurposing of product components.

● Shared Risk and Reward All capital structures must reflect an appropriate balance between risk and reward. Each participant in a transaction must share in the profit and loss of a transaction. This implies a reliance on credit (not debt) that is appropriately discounted and scaled to future productivity.

● Productive Economic Purpose The transaction must have a ‘material finality’ in that it is directly or indirectly linked to a real economic transaction. A real economic purpose is defined by a transaction including actual assets (not derivatives).

● Transparent All value exchanges in the global community are disclosed to all participants in the transaction allowing communities to assess their degree of engagement.

Read more about Integral Trade and our partners here: http://integraltrade.org/

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Energy Diversification in Zambia

A recent report by BBC News highlighted the threat to energy security in the southern African nation of Zambia posed by structural instability at its aging Kariba Dam.  The dam, constructed in 1959 to capture hydro power from the Zambezi River, is a key source of electricity for both Zambia and neighboring Zimbabwe.

Partson Mbiri of the Zambezi River Authority told the BBC that the dam’s spill gates are in need of maintenance and that the costs of a potential structural failure would be disastrous.  Although Zambia’s government has allocated funds for the repair of the Kariba spill gates, Mbiri emphasizes that the nation’s energy future cannot depend on the dam alone and must diversify.  This is an especially pressing concern in the face of the effects of climate change, which can cause instability in water levels and thus in the amount of hydroelectric power production.

The GIC has compiled sets of public domain innovation related to a number of renewable energy sources.  For Zambia’s geography and climate, solar and wind power would be advantageous ways for the country to diversify its energy sources by aligning its natural abundances with its needs.

The GIC set on Solar energy contains over 10,300 pieces of public domain innovation in Zambia, while the set on Wind Power Generation reveals that over 8,500 documents describing the relevant technologies have no legal protection in Zambia.

View the complete GIC sets on Solar and Wind energy by country here:

http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/solar

http://www.globalinnovationcommons.org/discover/subcategory/wind-power-generation

Sources:

BBC News. “Weak Kariba Dam walls threaten Zambia’s energy security.” 16 Jan. 2015. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-30850591