This ‘teamwork solution’ is not necessarily straightforward, however, and such team-
oriented strategies suggest particular features for effective evaluation. First, teams constructed
within a narrow field will, by definition, be poorly suited to evaluate ideas that cross the field’s
boundaries. Thus team evaluation will be most relevant if team structures can be flexibly
constituted to evaluate multi-disciplinary ideas. Second, locating appropriate experts is itself
challenging, especially when the required expertise is not well understood by the initial
evaluator(s). This search problem may create demand for generalists, as opposed to specialists,
with broader if shallower expertise and broader social networks.21 This search problem can also
create incentives for ‘open science’ style evaluation, where the public at large is given incentives
to evaluate ideas. However, public evaluation raises a third challenge around disclosure.
Especially for early stage evaluation, disclosing a great research idea publicly, thereby allowing
others to steal aspects of the idea, may dissuade innovative effort.
C. The United States Patent and Trademark Office
The USPTO has long emphasized a single examiner model. While there are explicit
systems of mentoring between senior and junior patent examiners, and some informal teamwork
in certain art units (Cockburn et al. 2003), a formal teamwork procedure to aggregate expertise in
evaluating and shaping patent claims appears largely absent. Meanwhile, there are ongoing
concerns that the patent examiner system misses substantial prior art in its evaluations (see, e.g.,
Jaffe and Lerner 2004). The recent “Peer-to-Patent” pilot program, which seeks to open prior art
searches to the public, is an interesting open-science style approach to tapping aggregate public
knowledge. At the same time, it is not clear that the public at large has the incentives (or
training) to help much in evaluating patent applications, and those parties who do have strong
incentives, such as commercial competitors, may act strategically here. The Peer-to-Patent
program also requires earlier public disclosure of the technology, which can run against the
patent applicant’s private interests and therefore incentives to invent.
21 The need for generalists, who can span areas of knowledge to improve team member selection and team function
(including overcoming communication challenges between team members with distant areas of expertise), is likely
growing as specialization narrows. Educational institutions and training systems may need to further adjust to create
such generalists. The role of generalists in teams, and its policy implications, awaits further empirical and theoretical
study.
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