The Conundrum of Enablement and Control

Science and innovation have become at once more competitive and more collaborative. Globalization increases competition, while growing complexity must be addressed by teamwork, coordination, interoperation, and reuse of resources. Scope and scale are achieved less by scaling internal investment and more by sharing data, knowledge, and infrastructure – often in partnership with competitors.

By providing an infinitely adaptable framework, cyberinfrastructure enables participants with different insights, skills, roles, and incentives to work together towards common goals and objectives – whether pursuing a research agenda, conveying insights to students, or developing a product. Getting the technological framework is essential, and it may be sufficient for homogenous groups or for well-understood complementary relationships, like supplier and customer. But if cyberinfrastructure is to reach its full potential, it must be open to loosely coordinated innovation by many differently situated participants who may choose to come and go. How well can they collaborate? Can they agree on contributions, procedures, interests, and expectations when foresight is imperfect and motivations differ?

Enabled by technology and infrastructure, collaborative advantage is becoming a fundamental, sometimes dominant component of competitive advantage in a richly interconnected world. Although autarchy and centralization are seen as limiting and untrustworthy, patents and other exclusionary controls have become more potent, pervasive, diversified, and complex – no less Internet-based infrastructure. While the power of cyberinfrastructure lies in its ability to span barriers and boundaries, the practical operation of patents depends on well-defined boundaries – “good fences”.

Can an infrastructure of fences be efficiently fitted to an infrastructure of bridges and highways? In theory, identification of ownership and boundaries should benefit from the capabilities of digital infrastructure including access to electronic documentation, search, the semantic web, and distributed review. But are the practices of control sufficiently aligned with the agility and integration of knowledge enabled by cyberinfrastructure? How will radically empowered collaboration and resource sharing play out at a global level in an environment with deeply institutionalized controls?

Experience with content and personal information on the Internet helps frame the problem, but the answers are a work in progress. Public laws can rebalance contending values and interests, but political response to technological change can be protracted and contentious. In many cases, private ordering mechanisms (e.g., portfolio cross-licensing, patent pools, data commons, open standards, public licenses) have emerged as extensions of infrastructure in response to opportunities and problems. How well do these mechanisms work to advance knowledge? How can they better help align accelerating flows of knowledge with increased incentives to control and the growing capacity to collaborate?