Laura Dorival Paglione
Director, Kauffman Innovation Network, Inc.
Since the advent of online retailing, we all have been amazed at what we
could find on Web sites like Amazon. The online selection of books, recorded
music, and other goods is much larger than in physical retail stores. In 2004,
in a seminal article in Wired magazine, editor-in-chief Chris
Anderson described how this phenomenon was changing the media and entertainment
industries.
Bricks-and-mortar outlets, limited by cost and physical constraints, can
offer only the items that seem most likely to be reliable sellers, Anderson
wrote. What the online retailers had shown was that huge potential markets were
being missed by this approach. He noted that a typical chain bookstore carries
130,000 titles, which may sound like a lot, "yet more than half of Amazon's book
sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles." Similarly, other sites were
finding plenty of people who wanted music and movies that physical outlets
didn't carry.
Anderson's article was titled "The Long Tail." Imagine a graph showing the
number of things offered at each popularity level with the few, very popular
hits to the left, and a very long tail representing the plentiful, but less
popular "non-hits" or specialty items (see below). No item in the tail
is a blockbuster, but the combined effect is a paradigm-buster. Instead of
narrow markets ruled by "the tyranny of the hit" (Anderson's term for the old
focus on best-sellers), we get markets where non-hits and specialty goods can
flourish as well.
Today, a Kauffman Foundation initiative is applying the power of the
long-tail model to some of the nation's most important products: research
technologies from universities.
iBridgeSM Network: Meeting a Need in Technology Transfer
The iBridgeSM Network is managed by Kauffman Innovation Network, Inc., a
not-for-profit offshoot of the Foundation created to advance innovations through
education about best practices, research, and fellowships. Its Web site
(iBridgeNetwork.org) serves as an aggregator of innovations by
researchers at universities across the United States. These inventions and
discoveries range from software and electronic devices to new chemical compounds
and materials.
Typically, university technology transfer offices (TTOs) license such
innovations for use. But one could say a TTO is equivalent to a
bricks-and-mortar store. With limited resources, high transaction costs, and
sometimes pressure to be a university profit center, most offices are driven to
focus on the innovations considered potential hits. Innovations that have merit,
but aren't regarded as big-hit material, may not be marketed actively at all.
In the past, untold thousands of technologies have gotten little or no
attention. Many are "research tools," useful mainly to other scientists. These
include items like special-purpose software that you may never want for your
home PC, but that can be used to run experiments or analyze results, or
biomedical compounds that will not be the next wonder drugs but might help to
produce them. Just getting more innovations of this type into use could give a
significant boost to scientific research and, eventually, to society and the
economy.
Also, there may be some hits hidden in this long tail—innovations that could
reach the mass market if they were noticed more widely and developed further.
We've all seen books or heard music that rose from obscurity to the mainstream
after being jump-started by long-tail marketing on the Web. Could something
similar be done for technological innovation? It so happened that, just when
Chris Anderson was writing his article, the Kauffman Foundation was moving into
action.
Early Results and Ultimate Vision
With seven pilot universities, the iBridgeSM Network launched its Web site in
2005. After a redesign based on the pilot experience, the site was re-launched
early in 2007. By the spring of 2008, nearly forty university campuses were
posting innovations on the iBridgeSM site, including many of the nation's
leading public and private research universities, plus a small but growing
number of independent, nonprofit research institutes.
Innovations available on the iBridgeSM Web site have passed the 3,000 mark—a
tail of considerable length—and actual licensing and use have been growing, too.
Most traffic has, indeed, been the dissemination of research tools, with users
reporting that the iBridgeSM Web site greatly enhances current and past methods
of moving innovations. Researchers have long "marketed" their work informally,
through personal networks or at conferences, and through the TTOs. But this is a
limited approach to reaching potential users of research, technologies, or other
innovations. Researchers are finding that the iBridgeSM Web site more than
augments their previous sources, such as scientific journals and Internet search
engines.
The iBridgeSM site is a one-stop shop, easy for all to use. Visitors can
browse by category to read about innovations, and the TTOs do not have to
laboriously process every transaction. Technologies can be offered with simple
click-to-agree licenses. Innovations that consist of software or databases
sometimes can be downloaded directly; others can be ordered online.
The iBridgeSM Network site is not the first or only of its kind, but it has
become a preeminent one. Also, the best long-tail markets are more than
transaction mechanisms; they are highly participatory, and the iBridgeSM Web
site is growing in that respect. One feature is the iBridgeSM Conversations
blog, for news and online discussion related to university innovation. The idea
is to connect people and organizations, transfer knowledge through innovation
licensing, and spur not just transactions, but collaborations. What is really
being built is a Web-based community of innovators, which can link with other
sites and communities. The ultimate vision is a new meta-network for advancing
innovation everywhere.
