Is a Knowledge Economy Really Achievable When Knowledge Theft is So Easy?

British Design Innovation (BDI) represents many of the leading industrial designers, service designers and innovation professionals in the UK.

Among other initiatives, BDI developed the Open Innovation Challenge (OIC), an innovation process model utilised to support knowledge-based propositions originating in the commercial design sector which contain inherent value in both hard and soft IP.

OIC not only supports designers' trading activities with corporate brand owners seeking external innovation, but also reinforces the status and differentiation of their propositions from crowd-sourced ideas.

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Good business ethics, a strong personal morality and best professional practices alone cannot protect professional Originators (who include scientists and industrial designers) from those with few qualms about replicating others' work, for recent history has shown that such attributes do not always reside in rogue individuals employed by commercial businesses.

And plagiaristic activity - intentional or otherwise - is rife within a public sector that appears to predominantly employ individuals of high intelligence but little or no commercial experience.

Many naively believe that the words "public domain" mean "free to all." They don't.

more: britishdesigninnovation.org/index.php?page=newsser (45)

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