Something About The Law

If all of intellectual property could be summed up in one maxim, it would probably be “Incentive increases innovation.” Scientists, artists and intellectuals tend to become more creative and produce both qualitatively and quantitatively better work, the theory goes, if you provide them with suitable rewards. As a corollary of this rule, others should be pre-empted from enjoying the fruits of your labour so that all of its rewards can accrue to you, encouraging you to produce more and others to  go make their own stuff.

This is a pragmatic theory, plausible as well, and has been used for well over a hundred years in national and international legislation. The only problem with this theory is that, well, it’s not true.

Research conducted by behavioural psychologists, economists and sociologists from the Universities of LSE, Princeton, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Chicago over the past decade have revealed something very interesting. Writer Daniel Pink sums their finding up in an elegant speech on motivation (hat tip to Tarun Kovvali).

The finding is this. All work can broadly be divided into two types, those that require more mechical, technical mastery over processes that we know about and only have to master; and the other type, those tasks that require us to utilise elements of creativity, imagination and innovation - conveniently lumped together by Pink into “Right Brain Tasks”.

For jobs of the first description, there seems to be a direct relation between rewards and productivity. Fair enough: you offer somebody more dollars or rupees per week to finish laying a given number of bricks or drafting a given number of IPOs, they work harder. However, for jobs of the second category, those that require creativity and thinking outside the box, rewards actually seem to deter innovation. Let’s go over this again: higher incentives led to worse, not better, innovation. At this point if you’re business-like enough you would realise that paying your scientists peanuts would increase their productivity by a multiple of infinity. Great news for entrepreneurs!

Except this extreme is not true. The trick, says Pink, seems to be to pay the innovator enough to make him stop thinking about the money. The minute you do that, you give scientists autonomy to the extent that they can exert a certain degree of mastery and self-direction in what they produce.

You can see a video of the talk here, animated brilliantly by Cognitive Media:

What this means is that intellectual property, in linking innovation so deeply to rewards, might actually be hindering it. This is a radical thought, and I am hoping more work will be done on the subject. Any finding promises to seriously upturn the foundations of the existing legal regime.

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