Pro geek hobbyists, innovation, and IPRs

When it comes to bleeding edge innovation, large companies are not often where it’s at.  This can be for a variety of reasons, but often larger companies end up innovating by acquisition or licensing rather than having large R&D budgets and doing everything in-house. Often larger companies will look to start ups or university tech transfer programmes (or university spin outs) for their innovation (resulting in new products or services), which the companies acquire or license and then take to market.

It’s often a well made match with the larger companies bringing skills and money into regulatory compliance, distribution, branding, and sales to the great ideas produced by small companies and university researchers.

Wired’s post on the super-serious pro-hobbyist rocketry crowd, Pyro Geek Hobbyists Experiment with Homebrew Rockets, made me think about how the really cutting edge innovation in some fields comes from the “pro-hobbyist” crowd. These extremely serious geeks blur the line between professional and amateur to a point where the labels really don’t matter — what matters is the products.

Tom Atchison, board member of hard core rocketry hobbyists, the Association of Rocket Mavericks, had this to say:

[W]e want to raise the technology [rocketry] to a level where we can address some of the challenges faced by the aerospace industry. We’re the early adopters. We’re in a position to take risks that companies can’t when they’re fulfilling government contracts. We can work on alternative propulsion systems and innovative recovery techniques. We’re saying, ‘Let the unwashed masses play with these things and conduct experiments and see what they come up with.’

I wonder though about the intellectual property aspects of companies looking to acquire technology developed through groups such as the Rocket Mavericks (such as prior art and patenting, infringement, trade secret protection, joint ownership). On the social side of things, I also wonder how the language of IP rights and thinking in property terms about their innovation would change the community of hobbyists (who I suspect work in a very collaborative way at present). Hobbyist innovation transferred to a commercial setting certainly isn’t a new issue: lots of new innovation in computer hardware and software originated with the pro-hobbyist crowd (such as the Homebrew Computer Club).

One question however: How does the development of a new class of pro-hobbyists change the IP and innovation landscape for both established players and start ups in a certain field?

So for example, if “pro-hobbyist biotech geeks” started to spring up everywhere coming up with new pharma/biotech products (excluding the Terence McKenna type crowd), how does this change things for established pharmaceutical companies? Where is the tipping point between outlying and often solitary thinkers in a field (the “fringe”) and groups of (“hobbyist”) innovators who can have a huge impact, and how do companies prepare for and deal with this change of landscape?

Are certain fields insulated from having to consider potential pro-hobbyist impact? Again with pharma as an example, will regulatory and safety barriers around human consumption and testing mean that they won’t ever need to directly address innovation in this space (because it won’t ever reach a certain level)?

For those in a sector with increasing pro-hobbyist involvement, how do you prepare and involve yourself (or not) for the “unwashed masses” and early adopters playing and experimenting?

What do you think?