Technology Strategy Board Driving Innovation Competition

I have just attended the Knowledge Transfer Network's Briefing Day for their new innovation competiiton - Technology-Inspired COllaborative Research and Development.

This has six strands the relevant one being Information and Communications Technology (or software as one person put it...

There is a pot of 18 million pounds for people who manage to form collaborative consortia that are usually underpinned by University research. Open Source was mentioned a few times!!

The Technology Strategy Board is keen to support business-oriented innovation across a broad range of technologies that fall within six areas.

All projects must contain a significant element of technology innovation.

This competition will focus on projects where recent technological discoveries or breakthroughs have inspired people to innovate in a context of significant technology risk, demanding highly skilled, multi-disciplinary resources, working in a collaborative project teams.

They are especially keen to encourage innovation in new enabling technologies that have the potential to span different disciplines and may not be directly driven by society's challenges. An example is innovations that lead to new technology platforms or 'springboardsa', from which the potential commercial benefits could be realised across multiple applications.

The scope includes taking a new technology into new application areas where significant technical challenges need to be overcome. Projects will generally be at the applied research stage leading to(and possibly including some) experimental development.

ICT STRAND

The ICT Strand of the project involves invitation of proposals regarding:

Engineering of ICT systems - means to configure new and complex end-to-end ICT-based systems that are fit for purpose.

The following topics are also in the scope:

Data-driven systems - techniques and tools to build and deploy whole solutions for continuous and reliable data collection in complex environments, to serve demanding data needs.

Intelligent Systems - ways to design and exploit autonomous and/or autonomic systems that perform safely in dynamic environments, but excluding ways to extract value from collected data and information.

User-centric systems - methodologies and tools to ensure that ICT systems align with user needs, values and preferences.

Sounds like a good remit for any Open Source firms out there - interested? Download the brief here.

Microsoft strategy against Android comes together

The Microsoft strategy against Android owes less to Ray Ozzie than it does to John Roberts.

As I noted at the time, the non-decision in Bilski vs. Kappos gave companies a green light to try and sue innovation out of existence.

This nightmare has now come to pass.

The problem with software patents, as opposed to those for drugs or medical devices, is that they don’t cover the way you do something, but the idea of doing something.

Thus, Microsoft claims to control the syncing of e-mail between the Web and a mobile device. You can’t innovate around the patent, as you might around the patent for a new pacemaker.

This is what makes software patents so dangerous. They place an ever-larger tax on innovation, because innovations are always based on what came before. And if you can’t innovate around an idea, then you must pay for it. And pay and pay and pay.

So we come to Android, which is drawing patent suits the way a fumble does 300-pound linemen. Microsoft is telling Android phone makers they must still pay it for use of its patents, that it might cost them less in Intellectual Property rights fees to go with Windows than with Linux.

In that scenario Windows doesn’t have to be better. It doesn’t even have to be as good. It just needs to be in the ballpark.

Patent rights in this scenario do for Microsoft what bundling did for it in the early 1990s. They get rid of competition.

Yes, this is a dangerous game. Other companies have big patent portfolios, not just Microsoft. Customers won’t like being denied choice, and being forced to buy inferior products at monopoly prices. You could have either a patent “nuclear war” — everyone suing everyone — or potent political blowback.

These are questions for another day. For now Microsoft’s patents are putting it back in the game, putting enough Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt into the minds of manufacturers that its offerings will get a hearing, and will likely find a place in the market.

How will Google respond, given the relatively small size of its patent portfolio compared with those of its proprietary rivals? How should it respond?

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.