Unused inventions get a crowdsourced creative spark

New website encourages anyone to come up with clever uses for untapped patents and inventions

GOT an inventive mind and feel like making a few thousand pounds? Then you might have some fun with Marblar.com, a website that will go live in late August. The site will ask users to suggest lucrative uses for "underexploited" patented technologies - with cash prizes of up to ?10,000 for the best ideas.

"There are a lot of dormant inventions just gathering dust in research universities," says Daniel Perez, Marblar's CEO. "This is taxpayer or philanthropy-funded research that isn't demonstrating the impact it could. So we'll simply be asking our users how they would use this invention."

Marblar is getting universities on board, as well as UK organisations like the Medical Research Council and the Science and Technology Facilities Council, all of which have patented technologies that they would like to squeeze more cash out of.

To test the idea, Marblar posted a technique patented by the University of Southampton that allows DNA nucleotides to be knitted together without using an enzyme. Days later, a University of Cambridge academic hit on a new use for the technique in screening potential DNA-based therapies. "This was a problem that the inventor wasn't really aware existed, much less that his discovery could solve," says Gabriel Mecklenburg of Marblar. "There may be now be start-up ideas around this tech."

"If Marblar leads to ideas like that it could well work. Any innovation like that has got to be encouraged," says Peter Finnie, a patent attorney with Gill, Jennings and Every in London.

Marblar is the latest in a string of "open innovation" sites that attempt, in one way or another, to encourage inventiveness online. "We're seeing many new online ways of interacting with the crowd," says Finnie. "All are geared at coming up with ideas you wouldn't have thought of yourself."

For instance, he says, ArticleOne asks its community of users to find "prior art" - published documents that show an invention existed before it was patented - to quash patents that firms have been accused of infringing. Again, there are cash awards available, as there are at Innocentive, where companies and NGOs present problems that they need solving - such as how to develop a portable rainwater storage system for the developing world. On the flipside, IbridgeNetwork and Yet2.com post university and corporate research in a bid to find people who'll license their technology to commercialise it.

"But most of these are dating sites for intellectual property," says Perez. "We're making tech transfer fun and gamifying it."

Fun it may be - but Finnie warns that there could be problems if users give away for a mere ?10,000 an idea that ends up kicking off a billion-dollar industry. This could happen, he says, because most patents cite the industrial application of an invention. "So the person who comes up with a new application may be regarded in law as the inventor. Yet they may just give the idea away online."

Perez believes Marblar's prize money will suffice. "Users have to ask why they are doing this. Are they doing it to make millions? Or as a bit of fun - creative problem-solving? In our tests, winners did not feel taken advantage of."

Time will tell, says Finnie. "Marblar expects to see start-ups forming around the contributed ideas. But that's when people start to fall out."

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