Assignment 11- Part 4

TED Talks- Beth Noveck

Hi Y’all,

This post will be a summary and discuss of Beth Noveck’s TED Talk. Beth Noveck was the former Deputy CTO at the white house. She talks about transparency being the catalyst necessary to improved innovation and government efficiency.

Her talk begins with talking about opening up one’s patent to the eventual growth of the technology and company in question. She uses Twitter as an example of a company that opened up its API and allowed other companies to build upon it which is part of the reason for Twitter’s increased popularity. This can be juxtaposed with Apple’s Siri which is no sense open source and thus has not seen as much innovation as it may have if other people were able to build off of it.

She then takes this concept and applies it to the government as a whole. She contends that if the USPTO for example was open source and allowed outside input and influence then experts from various industries could give their input on the validity of certain patent claims. She then expands this further to the concept of opening up just about every aspect of government so that the private sector and private individuals can build upon the governments work to increase efficiency and quality.

The issue with this concept is that while it may be effective in key examples like for Twitter it is a greatly flawed concept to apply systemically. For example Twitter did not take any R&D, but rather good execution. The invention of a new drug can cost millions and millions of dollars, so if TEVA allowed its drugs to be “open source” they would lose Billions and Billions in yearly revenue. Likewise certain aspects of government could and would be positively effected by transparency while others would suffer severly.