SHARING INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IN BUILDING SMART CITIES

BY LAVINIA MELITI

How are patent pools considered territories of high innovation? To transform urban environments into smart cities, innovation in planning, management, and operations is essential. Sharing intellectual property can enhance future value propositions for industrial and public actors and trigger the creation of new business models.

Picture a world where cars can fly across the sky, where robots run our homes, and where finding parking is not an issue because cars can fall into a briefcase. It sounds amazing, right? But what are smart cities? Smart cities have been described as driverless cars. That is the idea of optimizing something until it’s so efficient that it flows. The driverless car has been a vision synonymous with the future for a long time. It’s a system that takes care of itself, that analyzes its surroundings to get you where you need to go. It’s an interconnected world, not just the vehicle, that you trust to work to keep you safe and demonstrate humankind’s technological leaps and bounds. But there is a problem with this idea of smart cities as a world of cool gadgets and shiny technologies. I want you today to think beyond technology when we talk about smart cities.

For the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to explore emerging technologies and work with amazing visionaries and founders from startups all over the world. My mission is to support innovation in emerging technologies through IP, intellectual property, by democratizing access to existing technology while supporting others on their innovation journeys. In other words, technology and innovation are most often in the hands of few people and companies, but they should be in the hands of many.

Emerging technologies have been defined as capable of changing the status quo, being disruptors, and being innovative thinkers. It means advocating for change by looking into the future and envisioning different ways of doing things.

I believe in smart cities because I believe in innovation, and both are the future. PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts the global smart city market will reach $2.5 trillion by 2025. And even worldwide organizations like the United Nations or the European Investment Bank are trying to see how to deliver innovative urban services to citizens.

So, how does intellectual property play a role in our smart cities? I’m going to draw a line between something abstract, the concept of intellectual property, and something more concrete, the physical reality of our immediate surroundings.

Sometimes ideas are just the easy part.

The challenge is to access innovation for progress and encourage further innovation. Sharing the benefits of technology can unlock so many more possibilities and take us to places we never dreamed of going. Living in a city, the obvious services we take for granted are water, electricity, and sanitation, but we don’t even think about them. We just notice if they don’t work.

Property gives people legal rights over something, and property is what we tend to think of as an owner—it could be the owner of a house or a watch or a car. And the same thing applies to something you come up with in your mind, an idea you might want to claim as your own. That’s how ideas get patented, and that’s how you come up with intellectual property. The sharing of intellectual property occurs when the owner of an idea, a technology, or a patent permits others to use their idea. And it’s relevant

Smart Cities

Many people imagine smart cities as futuristic places with flying cars; but in order for a city to be smart, intellectual property needs to be democratized.

today because intellectual property is a powerhouse for innovation and economic growth. And this couldn’t be more true for smart cities.

Smart cities need intellectual property and technology. A great invention starts with a germ of an idea. Somewhere along the way, someone will patent an idea or a technology. But what if that technology is a system that provides cost-effective, efficient, and sustainable water purification? This tool could benefit growing even entirely new centers of population. But what if a city or country cannot access this technology because it’s monopolized by one corporation or owned by one person who’s getting extremely rich? Access to technology in an ideal world—or even an ideal city—should benefit everyone. And this requires a certain degree of democratization.

People care more than ever about the world in which they live. Harnessing intellectual property correctly will make the smart cities of the future, not just individual companies or individuals. The smart cities will be rich in the right facilities and the right environment for children to play safely, with ease of transportation and access to nature.

A few years ago in Newcastle, U.K., a senior professor in engineering gave a talk entitled, “Where Are All the Smart Cities?” One thing that stuck with me from his speech was when he asked why smart cities seem so slow to develop. He said each small decision was sitting atop the iceberg of other social, political, economic, and process-driven challenges. He identified that the problem is not with technology. Guess what? It’s with people. This resonated with me.

As Steve Jobs said, “Let’s go invent tomorrow instead of worrying about what happened yesterday.” Smart cities are ready and waiting in the wings. Smart cities are about people. If companies can come together to share their intellectual property and technology, and if companies can come together to solve problems for the greater good, the smart cities of the future and the people who live in them will finally thrive.