Innovative companies are “prospecting” for solutions on the virtual frontier.

The ideas expressed in old spaghetti westerns and what we see happening in the Internet today are not all that different. The Old West (at least the one portrayed in the movies) was all about good and bad and the basic freedoms and, sometimes, the lawlessness of a new territory. The Internet is all about success and failure and the basic freedoms and, sometimes, the lawlessness of new technology. To continue the analogy, consider the Internet enterprises that are comparable to Old West activities like bounty hunting and prospecting, featuring lively “eccentrics” (today played by inventors and CEOs). Whether these Internet companies will succeed or go the way of the spaghetti western remains to be seen, but they may have a starring role in the way new technology is spawned.

Innocentive
In the Old West, prospectors often went from town to town looking for the next gold strike in hopes of hitting it rich. Today, an Internet service named Innocentive acts like an Old West gold trader, telling mental prospectors (scientists) where to look for gold and then paying them when they bring their product in.

Innocentive was created by Ely Lilly’s e-R&D department with the idea that, using the Internet, Ely Lilly and other companies could access a large pool of scientists. Innocentive CEO Darrel Carroll says, “Lilly hires a large number of extremely talented scientists from around the world, but like every company in its position, it can never hire all the scientists it needs. No company can.” Innocentive has made using the Internet to find freelancing scientists a reality. Think of it as creating a community of prospectors willing to travel to the next gold vein.

Companies, called “seekers”, approach Innocentive and set an award for the solution to a problem. The seeker pays an access fee and a smaller fee for each problem posted. Casual Web surfers can only see basic information about the posted problems, to protect sensitive or proprietary information. Only registered users—called “solvers”—can access the full details of the problems after accepting confidentiality and other protection requirements.

Solvers working on problems submit their solutions to Innocentive, and then the seeking company reviews all of the responses. If a suitable solution is found, the seeker gives the solver the award money. If a solver does not come up with the complete solution, the seeker may give a portion of the award to the solver, but that is at the discretion of the seeker.

Since opening in June 2001, Innocentive has received 10 award-winning solutions: 4 in paper chemistry (problems that can be solved on paper) and 6 in wet chemistry (samples must be submitted and evaluated). The paper chemistry winners were postdocs and graduate students. The first wet chemistry winner was a retired chemist. The other wet chemistry winners were small companies—most located outside the United States. Scientists from more than 100 countries are registered Innocentive solvers, with potential wet chemistry solutions recently submitted from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Poland, Germany, China, India, Kazakhstan, and Singapore.

So why work on an Innocentive problem? First, money is a motivator in most cases. Monetary rewards are even more motivating for chemists and companies outside the United States, where a reward set to attract U.S. and European chemists may be worth more because of the lower cost of living. “In other cases,” says Carroll, “they [foreign labs] are motivated by their desire to prove capabilities and performance to some of our seeker customers to get their foot in the door. We have also seen early on that there was some prestige attached to winning.” For example, one of the early winners was listed on his university’s website for solving an Innocentive problem.

Retired chemists, such as the first wet chemistry winner, are excellent solver resources because they often enjoy using their years of scientific knowledge—without having a full-time job. According to Carroll, “There are contract research organizations (CROs) that have excess capacity from time to time, and this represents a really ideal capacity to work on projects.”

Carroll also indicated that to CROs or other companies, Innocentive’s problems represent research that is valuable yet has none of the business costs that go along with commercializing or developing a product. Therefore, the income that could be generated from attempting an Innocentive problem is of little financial risk.

There are some potential negatives for researchers interested in solving an Innocentive problem. Some researchers may not want to lose control of what they have developed. When signing the Innocentive agreement to take on a project, solvers accept that anything they develop becomes the property of the seeker company. Even if a solution leads to a commercially successful product, solvers are only entitled to the Innocentive reward.

However, the financial risks that are absent for businesses attempting to solve a problem are also absent for individual researchers. Hypothetically, if Innocentive did not have confidentiality agreements, a researcher could work on a solution and apply for a patent. The solver would have to beat other researchers working on the problem and may not find the best solution, but they would not know until they spent the time and money necessary to acquire a patent. Marketing the patent to companies also requires time and money. Theoretically, Innocentive lets scientists do what they want: work on research. As Carroll says, “Scientists are really passionate about the ability to work on things that interest them.”

Nevertheless, there are risks for scientists who accept the agreements and set out to find solutions. Many students and professionals have employment agreements that make any discovery made with equipment owned by the employer the property of the employer. Innocentive got around these restrictions with its first winners, who only submitted results on paper, so no laboratory equipment was used. Before attempting an Innocentive problem, it is the solver’s responsibility to determine if he or she can legally conduct the necessary research.

The Internet does offer a key advantage for scientists, says Carroll: “In an anonymized environment like Innocentive, ideas get judged on their merits and not on the curriculum vita of the individual that proposes them.”

BountyQuest
As in the Old West, there are also outlaws on the frontier of Internet prospecting: intellectual property (IP) outlaws. Bounty Quest (www.bountyquest.com), for example, is posting rewards on the Internet for information leading to the invalidation of a patent—akin to posting the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list on every post office wall.

Bounty hunting may not be the most highly regarded profession, but this IP bounty hunting can earn an ordinary person a big paycheck if he or she knows the right information at the right time.

BountyQuest’s existence is based on the need for better information on whether a patent could be invalidated. The U.S. patent system is dogged with inefficiencies and is so costly that many companies do not dare to infringe patents that should be invalid, because of the high cost of being sued for infringement. A company with a questionable patent can still threaten to bring a costly infringement lawsuit against another company.

With BountyQuest, companies can search for evidence that could make a patent infringement trial much shorter and come out in their favor, or they can submit their patent and see if there is evidence that could undermine it without the cost of suing another company for infringement.

The grand solution to eliminate the use of questionable patents is to conduct more complete prior art searches. Prior art is a term for materials (such as paper documents) that were publicly available and technically relevant to an invention when the invention was made. This information is then used to determine if a patent should be granted, and, if one has already been granted, if it should be invalidated. Prior art searches are not glamorous, and the workload is generally too great to be interesting for professional prior art searchers. However, this can be changed if the right person were to do it, namely, a person who is interested in the particular field or even a person who published the same idea. It’s analogous to getting an outlaw’s friends and neighbors to turn him in. That is BountyQuest’s goal, to get the right people for each patent looking for that patent’s prior art.

The search appears to be working, or at least intriguing people. The site says that it has received hundreds of submissions. Cella says, “With thousands of people looking at the bounties, we’ve already created the broadest searches in the history of prior art searching!”

Genomic Bounties
Indeed, two bounties have been awarded in the genomics field: one on a lab instrument and one on a database technique. A “senior-level scientific officer in a medical instrumentation company in the Northeast” won $10,000 by providing a Japanese document that discusses a robot that can locate and cut out the protein spots on an electrophoresis gel. This information may be used to invalidate a 2000 patent (U.S. 6,064,754) awarded for this type of instrument to Oxford GlycoSciences. Oxford is threatening Nycomed Amersham with a patent infringement case.

In another award, a German computer science grad student, Holger Blasum, who also has a master’s degree in biology, won $10,000 for finding two articles from the journal Nucleic Acids Research that “may significantly impair Incyte’s [Incyte Genomics] ability to assert this database patent against competitors.” This is BountyQuest’s way of saying that the patent is likely invalid, but it is not invalid until the courts decide so. Incyte’s patent (U.S. 5,966, 712) claims a database and system for storing, comparing, and displaying genomic information. Cella commented, “With his intimate knowledge of the field, he [Blasum] was able to track down what we needed in a couple of hours.”

The common theme expressed by the winners of the patent awards is that they are all experienced in the field in which they won. There are other, non biotechnology winners listed on the BountyQuest website, from Internet ads to remote controls and electronic tickets.

One question remains: whether any of the winners will be characters in future “Internet frontier” movies.