Working session led by Moses Ma, FutureLab Ventures, Mark van der Waal, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Net Jacobsson, Sparklabs Global Ventures
Submitted to the 4th Rebooting the Web of Trust Technical Workshop as a discussion paper
Paris, April 19-21, 2017
Our goal is to create an immutable global system of record for the management of ideas and innovations: the IP Blockchain. This vision starts with a new way to establish and verify ownership of an idea and the intellectual property rights generated – coordinated by an intellectual property policy server and an immutable ledger for intellectual property rights. However, all of the transactions, licensing revenues, interests and equity generated by that intellectual property requires authentication, signatures, verification authorities and trustable timestamping. And so, self-sovereign identity and trust frameworks with algorithmic governance could be used to provide the identity infrastructure needed by the proposed system. Our goal is to work with the participants of this workshop to develop a model for integrating the IP Blockchain with self-sovereign identity.
Our first effort will be to explore the application of this system in the arena of life science research, specifically toward enhancing global responsiveness to infectious disease outbreaks. This will be implemented as a pilot project, through a joint effort between FutureLab Ventures, Spark Labs Global Ventures, and biopharmaceutical innovation researchers from the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Deployed for post-outbreak innovation, we propose that the IP Blockchain could offer a new architecture for collaborative research and development, tackling several of the currently existing barriers to efficient innovation and transforming how vaccines and other relevant technologies are delivered to society. As such, the IP Blockchain could stimulate a disruptive shift in the coordination of academic and commercial efforts in mitigating epidemic threats of global concern.
More frequent travel, globalized trade and greater interconnectedness between countries have brought increased urgency to the topic of infectious disease outbreak responsiveness. The spreading of emerging pathogenic microorganisms has now become as inevitable as it remains unpredictable. Moreover, the ability of microorganisms to rapidly evolve and escape established drug or vaccine treatments means the international community should be ready to respond with applied innovative efforts at any point in time to deliver targeted vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics. Only in the case of a timely introduction of such technologies that could significantly improve research collaboration, world-wide contamination can be halted.
Therefore, we deconstruct the innovation process in the context of infectious diseases, which may be conceptualized as an integral cycle of consecutive, value-adding stages, linking the unmet medical need (i.e. a prevailing infectious disease) to innovative technology specifically impacting that need. With regard to the innovation process as illustrated below, significant IP- and ownership-related barriers have been identified for which blockchain functionalities could provide a solution.
Figure 1: The cyclic innovation process in the context of emerging infectious diseases (Van den Nieuwboer et al., 2015; adapted by Van Schaik, personal communication).
We believe that our forthcoming collaboration at this workshop could help us determine not only how self-sovereign identity could be integrated, but much more is possible. For example, consider the possibility of using a Merkle directed acyclic graph to manage ideation, collaboration and adaptively generated patent pools – this is something we call “IdeaGIT”. This could provide an interesting avenue for investigation. We believe many more ideas will be developed with broad participation.
We look forward to working with all of you on this project, which we believe promises deep ramifications on humanity's ability to deal with pandemics. This meeting of the minds in Paris will help such concepts to propagate "virally", countering infectious diseases with infectious ideas.
For more info, please email moses.ma@futurelabconsulting.com