You’ve heard of the “deep web,” the content that’s behind firewalls or paywalls or that’s otherwise un-indexable by search engines. You also may have heard of “dark social,” the vast trove of social traffic that’s invisible to most analytics programs. What you may not know about yet is “dark IP,” the intellectual property (IP) that remains on the shelf: undiscovered, unexplored, untapped.

Deep web, dark social, and dark IP all highlight the fact that our ability to catch so much in the net by dragging the surface (to use Mike Bergman’s analogy) actually still misses the invisible wealth of what lies beneath.

An astonishing 65 percent of invention disclosure bundles remain, on average, unlicensed and unused each year.But dark IP is different than the other hidden-depths knowledge since it’s also unfair. Because taxpayers paid for much of the research – whether basic understanding with long-term benefits or more applied research with shorter-term benefits – that now lies collecting dust on university shelves.

In the last decade alone, the people of the United States spent an average of nearly $40 billion every year supporting institutional research – from universities to hospitals (via grants) – with about two-thirds coming from the federal government. Yet when a set of 145 research institutions were examined over the period between 2002 to 2009, we found an astonishing 65 percent of invention disclosure bundles remain, on average, unlicensed and unused … each year. [The research, which was commissioned and funded by the Kauffman Foundation (where I’m a Senior Scholar) was conducted by Rosemarie Truman, founder and President of RHT Consulting.]

Of course, not all inventions should necessarily be licensed. There are many seemingly frivolous patents, like an umbrella for one’s beer (#6637447). We don’t know what fraction of the unlicensed inventions that lie fallow should remain so. But here’s the thing. We shouldn’t have to know. Maybe some brilliant person knows what to do with a beer umbrella besides, well, putting it over one’s beer.

As William Gibson famously said, "...the street finds its own uses for things." Yet right now, most of the IP (much of which we paid for) isn’t actually on the street, where entrepreneurial folks can do something with it.

[#contributor: /contributors/59322ee5edfced5820d0ed2b]|||Samuel Arbesman is an applied mathematician and network scientist. He is currently a senior scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. Arbesman is the author of *[The Half-Life of Facts](http://halflifeoffacts.com/)* and blogs for Wired Science on [Social Dimension](https://www.wired.com/wiredscience/socialdimension).|||

Let's Help the Street Find Uses for IP ————————————–

Why does so much intellectual property languish on the shelf?

Well, there’s the overworked and understaffed tech transfer offices at universities charged with bringing these ideas into the world. Not to mention that their models for spinning out IP rely heavily on either the inventor or licensee knowing what they want to do with it: There’s not necessarily room for exploration and discovery. And then there’s the byzantine bureaucracy of large organizations. So much goes on at a single university that it’s hard for anyone outside it, let alone inside a single department, to know what’s going on.

But let’s face it, there’s also the hoarding and the overprotecting. While universities don’t do as much defensive patenting as corporations do, they are focused on staking their claims over ideas and making sure that IP gets patented. So much IP is generated that it’s far too much for any one entity to ever make sense of.

All of this means that very few people are aware of – let alone able to access – an invention outside the social circle of its inventors, the scientific community involved, or even the “crowd” that’s sometimes harnessed in open innovation.

Right now, most of the IP isn’t actually on the street. We need new ways of democratizing the ways in which IP is discovered and licensed.That’s why we need new ways of democratizing it. Not democratizing the IP itself – institutions should still own and generate profits from the intellectual property they’ve created – but democratizing the *ways *in which we allow this IP to be discovered and licensed.

There are already a growing number of companies that issue challenges or idea contests to generate intellectual property using the crowd (like InnoCentive and NineSigma). There are also marketplaces that match buyers to sellers of pre-existing IP (like yet2.com and the iBridge Network). Marblar, where I’m an advisor, also runs competitions to find uses for on-the-shelf IP.

But that’s it. Most of these and other models just provide some online mechanism for anyone interested in searching and licensing technologies from participating universities. They’ve merely changed the tool, but not the approach, and are therefore still missing out on the transformative potential of what technology can do here. (While a few new promising sites have popped up lately, they’re still focused on prevention, defense, and addressing problems with the patent system, rather than promoting new ways of interacting around intellectual property.)

>Forget web 2.0 and 3.0 when it comes to dark IP. We’re not even in web 1.0 here yet.

Where, for example, is the e-commerce website and shopping cart for IP? We still can’t license most IP online – think an eBay with its marketplace, or an Amazon with its one-click to purchase.

Forget web 2.0 and 3.0 when it comes to dark IP. We’re not even in web 1.0 here yet. This turns off the average entrepreneur, who doesn’t have the patience and bandwidth to engage in all the unnecessary overhead of searching, browsing, and licensing IP. Many small startups don’t even bother with IP.

Another missing piece is ways of allowing the crowd to interact with each other and decide which technologies should be licensed – rather than relying on institutional bureaucracies alone. Imagine bidding wars that could displace and replace (arguably necessary) intermediaries in the IP marketplace such as patent trolls.

Now, I understand there are good reasons for not turning everything into a marketplace. VC Rajil Kapoor notes that while it does make sense to create one for highly illiquid markets like IP, there are good reasons (valuation transparency, transaction standards, litigation risks) that “attempts to create eBays or Craigslists or Yelps or Sotheby’s for IP have either been shut down or are functioning at puny scales.”

>But the only purpose of such marketplaces isn’t transaction. It’s community.

And he’s right. Most of the examples I listed above haven’t changed much over the past decade or broken into the mainstream.

But the only purpose of such marketplaces isn’t transaction. It’s community. It seems we never get tired of saying “a Kickstarter for blank” but heck, why not a Kickstarter for IP? Such a website would bring together not just funds and transactions, but communities – with their attendant feedback mechanisms – that are interested in creating something novel around unused patents. At the very least, such a structure would open up the currently closed shelf to virtual browsing – so inventions are not only ‘filed’ or ‘granted’ but ‘browsed’ or ‘licensed’.

Most importantly, such a model would help get the ideas of a few into the minds of many.

Only then can this dark IP – again, work that we all have supported through our tax dollars – move outside research institutions to benefit the entrepreneur ecosystem and society as a whole. Only then can the street surprise us with the uses it finds for all those little things currently hidden in dark IP.

Wired Opinion Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90