[vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text disable_pattern=”true” align=”left” margin_bottom=”0″][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text disable_pattern=”true” align=”left” margin_bottom=”20″]GE is one of numerous non-oil producers who’ve joined COSIA, Canada’s Oil Sands Innovation Alliance, as an associate member. A consortium of 13 corporations that together produce 90 per cent of the Canadian oilsands products, COSIA is attempting to improve the sector’s environmental performance by pooling nearly $1-billion worth of development from Suncor Energy, Syncrude, Imperial and other long-time competitors. “The value to all of us is to get better technology in the field, not trying to spend the time figuring out who will own it and who will get the competitive advantage,” says Brian Gregg, GE Canada’s leader of global research. “The oilsands are competing with other sources of oil, not with the individual players.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text disable_pattern=”true” align=”left” margin_bottom=”0″]Together with other COSIA members, GE recently invested $18 million to help innovate ways of reducing carbon emissions and water use in developing Canada’s oilsands. It also held two $500,000 challenges, facilitated through COSIA and NineSigma, for companies that might have a way to make steam generators more efficient and an invention to get more value out of low-grade heat, which in turn would reduce natural gas usage.
Since its 2012 founding, COSIA has spurred over 185 technology projects in areas of water treatment, greenhouse gas emissions and land and tailings management. But to get there, each member had to overcome its own restrictions on sharing proprietary information. For GE, this openness to IP sharing is coming from the top. During a talk on 21st century leadership in Calgary in the summer of 2014, GE CEO Jeff Immelt told the audience that he wanted to use GE technology to help improve oilsands development. GE has played a role in developing the oilsands since providing power generators to some of the earliest northern Alberta mining sites, but Immelt proposed companies share their know-how and best practices to win over oilsands critics. “I think we live in an open-source world,” he later told The Globe and Mail. “I’m more aligned with Elon [Musk] than I am with others… I actually think everybody benefits in the end.”
Sanjay Goorachurn, however, an IP management lawyer with Montreal’s Smart & Biggar /Fetherstonehaugh, the nation’s largest intellectual property and technology law firm, cautions that this openness to openness can’t be oversimplified. The company with the know-how to, say, reduce tailings toxicity, may not be the one with the capital to commercialize it. “Then the question becomes, ‘What’s being contributed by each party, what’s a fair contribution and what’s a fair share of the value created?’ ” asks Goorachurn. “Now imagine you have not two but five parties at the table.”
Goorachurn says more of the small venture-backed companies that hire him are willing to share their IP, but they are right to be skeptical when big corporations want to co-develop it with them. “One concern is they will undervalue your IP. Two, they may, in different ways, pressure you to give up rights over IP.” Goorachurn adds, “You have to manage your IP solidly especially when you’re collaborating and partnering, because if you don’t you’ll end up getting screwed somehow.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text disable_pattern=”true” align=”left” margin_bottom=”0″][mk_dropcaps style=”simple-style”]I[/mk_dropcaps]nstead of knowledge pooling, the Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporations, born from Alberta’s 2008 climate change strategy, uses the province’s regulations and grants to accelerate innovation. So far it is responsible for several dozen projects, together worth $1.6 billion. The more than $200-million investment comes from energy industry companies who are obligated to contribute to the CCEMC $15 per tonne of GHG emitted over the initial 100,000-tonne limit. The CCEMC states among its goals reducing the province’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10.2 megatonnes by 2020. While the costs to oil companies of exceeding their limits is negligible compared to their profits, this policy helps bring clean-tech products to market without asking their respective developers to sign over any intellectual property rights. After all, CCEMC’s return on investment isn’t money. It’s GHG reduction.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][mk_image src=”https://energy-exchange.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Noah-Helman-Derek-Greenf-copy.jpg” image_width=”800″ image_height=”350″ crop=”false” lightbox=”false” frame_style=”simple” target=”_self” title=”Noah Helman, Derek Greenfield and Elizabeth Clarke of California company Industrial Microbes, which won $500,000 from an Alberta-based energy innovation incubator.” caption_location=”outside-image” align=”left” margin_bottom=”10″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][mk_blockquote style=”line-style” font_family=”none” text_size=”18″ align=”left”]We made a decision quite some time ago that wrestling with people over their intellectual property only discourages participation and limits access.[/mk_blockquote][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text disable_pattern=”true” align=”left” margin_bottom=”20″]“We made a decision quite some time ago that wrestling with people over their intellectual property only discourages participation and limits access that we would have to all kinds of ideas that we might otherwise not hear about if we elected to go in that direction,” says Kirk Andries, CCEMC’s managing director. Not surprisingly, its recent $35-million challenge for inventions that find commercial uses for stored carbon (rather than the capturing or storing of it) attracted 344 submissions from 37 countries. Among them was Derek Greenfield’s company, Industrial Microbes, which collected $500,000 from the first round of the competition and is one of 24 semi-finalists. The winner gets a $10-million grant. The California company wasn’t attracted just to the prize money, but the contest’s multiple stages that carry the idea from concept to market. “Prizes historically have been shown to catalyze industries, especially in a field that’s been stuck for a while,” says Greenfield, pointing to how the XPrize launched private space exploration. “And clean energy is a little bit stuck right now.”[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][mk_image src=”https://energy-exchange.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/CCEMC-Grand-Challenge-Roun-copy.jpg” image_width=”800″ image_height=”350″ crop=”false” lightbox=”false” frame_style=”simple” target=”_blank” desc=”PHOTO: COURTESY CCEMC” caption_location=”outside-image” align=”left” margin_bottom=”10″ link=”http://www.zero2014.com/” title=”The round one winners of the Climate Change and Emissions Management Corporations’ $35-million challenge for innovation (learn more at visit www.zero2014.com).”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text disable_pattern=”true” align=”left” margin_bottom=”0″]The Industrial Microbes’ invention is simple. Instead of eating sugar, the microbe they use eats methane and CO2, and results in an acid by-product that is used in creating pharmaceuticals, beverages and even yoga pants. Even with only three founding staff, Greenfield says the company had to file a provisional patent. “Based on the current system we need to file patents. That’s how investors and other companies evaluate us. We’re expected to have a patent and that’s the main value that we bring at this stage, before we have commercial products.” That said, Greenfield would rather not have to bother with them. “It’s incredibly complicated,” he says of the U.S. and International Patent System. “And all these steps are highly technical, not in the scientific sense, but the legal sense.”
Indeed, that process can be difficult to navigate, so companies of his size without a legal team have to turn to lawyers, something that gets expensive. “I don’t want to have to spend a lot of time and money drafting patents and following up.” But open innovation? “It’s a great trend and works best when all the companies participate fairly.”
Crowdsourcing does have its pitfalls. Whether on behalf of grant agencies or conglomerates, these callouts are largely ignored by big companies with robust research and development assets, unless of course they’re initiating them. So the crowd doesn’t always deliver the best possible solution. As well, it could potentially scare off investors who need more than a promise to protect their investment. For the same reasons, some technologies may never come out of the woodwork in an open patent system.
“Tesla is a special case,” says Goorachurn. Musk “needed other players to work alongside to build a market.” He adds, “That’s not a trend that will continue. Why would you spend $25 million to $30-plus million over five to 10 years building a technology, a patent portfolio and then just give it away? That’s the tail wagging the dog.”
Greenfield sees it differently. “Younger people, in general, growing up in a greater era of transparency, expect that in all aspects of their lives, online and in their work. And that’s something that we’re striving for too,” he says. “I think clean energy is such a complicated problem and all the solutions won’t be the same, even in the same country let alone different parts of the world. We’ll need all the solutions we can get.”
It comes as no surprise to learn that Greenfield and his partners are in their early and mid-30s. The concepts of open innovation, open source development and patent pooling are embraced more by the new generation of entrepreneurs than the one before them, says Denys Resnick of NineSigma. “There’s a lot of discussion of millennials being open and sharing and not being as inhibited by structure,” she notes. “I really believe that’s where the trend will go, in terms of generational and corporate behaviour.”
Musk, Immelt and Larry Page of Google have already started reshaping the dialogue, but one can expect this generation of entrepreneurs to push it further because they grew up in a world with unfettered, instantaneous access to information. Perhaps they take the accessibility and transparency for granted, but regardless, it’s fast becoming a cultural expectation. “From my personal experience,” says Greenfield, “I can say that people my age want organizations to be much more transparent than they currently are.” [mk_font_icons icon=”icon-stop” size=”small” padding_horizental=”4″ padding_vertical=”4″ circle=”false” align=”none”][/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][vc_column_text disable_pattern=”true” align=”left” margin_bottom=”0″ el_class=”Story-Author”]By Omar Mouallem[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/1″][mk_padding_divider size=”40″][mk_button dimension=”three” size=”large” outline_skin=”dark” outline_active_color=”#fff” outline_hover_color=”#333333″ bg_color=”#13bdd2″ text_color=”light” icon=”moon-reading” url=”/resources/energy-exchange-magazine/issue-3/” target=”_self” align=”left” fullwidth=”true” margin_top=”0″ margin_bottom=”15″ animation=”fade-in”]Read more stories from the Winter 2015 issue of Energy Exchange magazine[/mk_button][/vc_column][/vc_row]