The Challenges of Authentication in Protecting Creativity at the Source
Innovation, creativity, and the expression of creativity are the fundamental drivers of a country’s scientific, industrial, cultural, and economic success. It is essential to instill confidence in inventors by establishing the means to protect creativity at its source. Certifying the authenticity of a new idea—or of the person who conceived it—is essential to ensuring fairness in our vibrant age of inventors.
Michel Robert, University of Montpellier and Jean Sallantin, University of Montpellier
The technical challenge is to propose a simplified idea submission solution that has the legal capacity to protect both aspiring and established innovators and can be rapidly deployed on a national scale, while respecting the need for confidentiality—only the submitter can view it—and transparency—it is partially disclosed so that good ideas emerge when compared with others. An economic and societal challenge would be ensuring that the management of the proliferation of individual creative acts serves as a catalyst for the emergence of ideas at the local level that are capable of addressing challenges such as climate change and threats to biodiversity.
Creativity is poorly protected
In the academic world, the recognition of risk-taking and creativity in the evaluation of researchers should be based on practical, established metrics that go beyond the current framework—which is too narrow and sometimes inadequate, such as patent filings—for measuring the impact of research.
The issue of protecting the research work of undergraduate and graduate students in laboratories is also frequently raised, with unfortunate instances of abuse in the exploitation of their work—such as excluding them from the authorship of scientific publications. However, there are protective measures in place in doctoral schools and laboratories, such as the “lab notebook” that chronologically records the work performed; yet this type of measure is not easily adaptable to all scientific disciplines.
In today’s digital society, with its interconnected devices and new applications (such as video games), talented students—and even high school students—are increasingly being identified outside the traditional research laboratory channels. Universities and schools play a role by supporting them in various technical, scientific, and educational aspects (e.g., innovation competitions), but could also play a role in protecting the concepts they develop.
The issue of preserving creative wealth also arises for startups, which by their very nature embody the values of innovation and creativity but have low survival rates; this raises the question of protecting inventors’ intellectual property rights; and the question of how to capitalize on ideas that are unfortunately left gathering dust in boxes after one or two years of work on a project!
So, in such a strategic context, how can we support, promote, and ensure the recognition of creativity? How can we develop an ecosystem that protects everyone who contributes new ideas?
How can we make the protection of creativity more accessible to everyone?
There are, of course, mechanisms for documenting innovation, such as patent applications or the Soleau envelope, but they are too expensive, too complex, and not widely known; above all, they come into play too late and in a non-systematic manner within the value chain. The goal, therefore, is to create an entire ecosystem dedicated to protecting creativity, but above all to collecting, cataloging, and promoting it.
To address these challenges, we propose the creation of a platform that is user-friendly, accessible to all, visible, and well-recognized—one that is responsible for safeguarding the ideas it hosts, as well as promoting them.
- The societal challenge is to create an ecosystem that supports and promotes innovation throughout France.
- The economic challenge is to build trust between the project leaders and the various stakeholders.
- The technical challenge is to develop an efficient, secure IT system that is physically distributed across the region.
The basic idea here is to make protected ideas available online, as they are authenticated by notaries, who are specialists in authenticating all kinds of legal documents. Ideally, this public service would be free of charge to encourage the dissemination of ideas that creators wish to make public and to ensure the safekeeping of ideas that creators wish to keep secret for the time being, so they can choose the right moment to release them. It would also allow editorialists to bring the platform’s content to life by organizing dynamic indexing of the ideas arising from the debates they spark.
Debates are the established means of advancing knowledge for all and developing ideas themselves. That is why creators must be given the ability to protect their ideas when they are being debated—that is, even before copyright management or the filing of patents for an invention in which they are involved. Thus, protection must occur “at the source”; it must be immediate and easily accessible.
To achieve this, it is necessary to have the capability to provide the most effective technological framework for securing end users, so that every aspect of their innovations uploaded to the platform is indisputably linked to their identity while allowing their advancements to be showcased. This is now possible through a blockchain-based approach. The idea is to entrust notaries with the responsibility of authenticating and protecting the ideas of their creators and securing their relationships, while promoting the value of these ideas. Their role as authenticators will drive the process and ensure the certification of transactions. Notaries already have a shared, secure, distributed IT infrastructure for drafting and archiving legal documents. Notaries receive deeds, some of which are unilateral (authentic wills). By accepting the deposit, the notary helps combat fraud or identity theft and provides the depositor and third parties with assurance of the deposit and its date; the blockchain, for its part, secures the file, ensures its longevity, and enables its consultation.
Toward a creativity authentication loop
It was in this context that a prototype creativity authentication loop was developed for the Lyon Regional Council of Notaries, using the Hyperledger platform
Provided by the author
The process of validating ideas involves several stakeholders:
- Project leaders who will use the idea protection filing service to promote their work;
- Contributors, who are the individuals and institutions that serve as points of contact for project leaders (such as universities, engineering schools, incubators, etc.) and will encourage project leaders to submit their ideas and work;
- Validators—who are notaries—will use their authority to record project creators’ ideas on the blockchain;
- Editorialists whose mission is to disseminate ideas through a communication strategy. These publishers could be private or public agencies seeking to initiate new projects, or third-place spaces promoting creativity within their region.
- Businesses that will have premium access to the ideas catalog to request direct connections with project leaders.
A new virtuous and pragmatic ecosystem
By its very nature, blockchain technology—with its cryptographic principles and its approach to data and transaction distribution—is ideally suited to addressing issues of timestamping, traceability, and immutability. When it comes to a matter as critical as protecting innovation, it provides a major technological safeguard to protect the interests of project stakeholders and prevent any conflicts of interest. Nevertheless, it remains merely a facilitator, and for adoption to take place, it is essential that this mission be championed by stakeholders who see both societal and economic value in it. The founding idea is therefore to offer a blockchain platform that simply meets the immediate needs of the various innovation stakeholders.
1) For project leaders who lack the technical capacity to protect an innovation, the platform provides a simple and easily accessible digital process for protecting innovations.
2) For those who are unaware of the protection options available to them or who lack interest in protecting their ideas, they will be assisted by an editorial team that, in collaboration with the notarial network, is responsible for producing a simplified catalog of innovations designed to facilitate connections between project leaders and potential industrial partners.
3) With a survival rate of less than 20%, all the innovations developed by a young company—which are lost once the company ceases to exist—would be highlighted as protected innovations in a simplified catalog made available to industrial partners.
4) Given the challenges organizations face in innovating and their constant need to attract talent and new ideas, there would be direct access to a streamlined, anonymous innovation catalog, with the option to connect directly with project leaders.
5) Notaries face a general lack of understanding regarding the societal value of their profession. Since they will serve as the moral and legal guarantors of a system aimed at a broad, younger audience, notaries could promote their role in protecting innovation and creativity—in a straightforward manner and for the benefit of as many people as possible.
Based on these concepts and the development of a prototype that could easily be created today using blockchain technology, we can envision a simplified, paperless filing system designed to foster creativity among innovators. Deploying such a system within a public framework in collaboration with the notarial profession would enable the rapid nationwide implementation of new, responsible practices that promote creativity.
This article was co-authored by Denis Pierre Simon, a notary (honorary president of the Lyon Regional Council of Notaries), and Nicolas Herzog (a blockchain development expert).
Michel Robert, Professor of Microelectronics, University of Montpellier and Jean Sallantin, Emeritus Research Director at the CNRS, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.