Reply To: March 5-9 2007: 7th Symposium on Current Trends in International Fusion Research in DC

[vansig]

Open research is about admitting that you don’t have the resources to do the whole thing, yourself.
In this realm, competing research is conducted by adversaries, racing to the same goal.

It’s expensive to conduct research, and if not well-protected, relatively easy to steal it. but if a business desires to patent an invention, it wants to show that the invention is: novel, useful, and non-obvious. So presenting the problem to be solved, information about the market, and even partly disclosing your research direction can be useful, since it promotes healthy discussion and may also attract investors. You just don’t want to disclose too early, or arbitrarily.

Since patents are only valid for 17 years, timing is critical. I still have plans for inventions I thought of twenty years ago, that were infeasible to build at the time. And only today are such things becoming possible.

So work in-progress is jealously guarded. You may not know that a particular direction is going to bear fruit. and everyone has their ear to the ground, listening to the discussion. When another team gets close to your territory, you know it’s time to publish.