A. Richard Newton
Dean of the College of Engineering University of California, Berkeley

Q1: How are you involved with the Intel Research Berkeley lab?

A1: I'm a member of the lab's advisory board, representing the College of Engineering. There are a few others on the Board from Berkeley, including a representative from the university's Office of Technology Licensing. We hold regular meetings during which the lab presents the research it's been doing and its future plans. Our job is to provide feedback and oversight, and to make sure that the university's interests are well represented in the lab's activities.

Q2: How would you describe the relationship between the lab and UC Berkeley? What are the key benefits to the university and to Intel?

A2: We have had a long and fruitful relationship with Intel that stretches back almost to the beginning of the company. Over that period there has been very strong interaction between our faculty and students and Intel on a variety of topics. To me, the Intel Research Berkeley lab is in many ways a logical outcome and consolidation of that relationship.

The most exciting part of this relationship to me is the opportunity that Researchers have to mix freely with graduate students and faculty. At the same time, the lab provides a unique opportunity to our faculty and, more importantly, to our students-both graduate and undergraduate, to interact directly with a major corporation like Intel.

One of the key attributes of the lab is its openness and the fact that faculty and students involved in lab activities are free to publish the results of their research. Similarly, the Intel employees who are working in the context of the lab are making their work available broadly to many constituencies.

Q3: Why is openness important?

A3: In the College of Engineering at Berkeley, the principle that we follow in our thinking about intellectual property is how to maximize the impact of our research. The principal reason we as faculty are here at Berkeley is not to make money from our inventions; rather, we are here to maximize the positive impact of our research on the world. We believe that creating an open and collaborative research community is the best way to do that in the information technology sector.

I give a great deal of credit to Intel for recognizing the value of an open and collaborative research model and for driving it forward. So many companies that I have interacted with over the years have a hard time understanding that making technology development open in some areas - and information technology is a key one-ultimately accrues a lot more value, even to individual companies, than trying to do research with universities in a closed and proprietary way.

Q4: How does an open model maximize the impact of research in the information technology sector? In many other sectors, it seems that a proprietary approach generates more value.

A4: That's true for some sectors. Suppose we were working on a biological molecule, and we developed a new cure for cancer. For a company to take that invention to the market through all of the FDA testing and the approval processes might cost $500 million today. If we made the molecule freely available, it's not clear that any particular company would invest the half billion dollars. Why should they? Once the drug has been approved, another company could beat them to market and gain the value without having to make the investment. In such a case, to maximize the impact of the research, it might be best to license the molecule to one company exclusively, to give them an incentive to make that necessary investment.

Our experience has been that this approach doesn't work well for information technology. Typically, by the time an IT idea is commercialized, someone has come up with a variation of your idea that is equally as good or slightly better; one that captures the attention of the world, and the impact of your research is lost. Often in IT, a new idea requires the contribution of many before it reaches that evolutionary point of critical mass and takes off, enabling an entirely new community of researchers, for example.

People can almost always find ways around many IT inventions, which are more like processes than they are like products. Whereas inventing a molecule is a discrete thing, if I invent a new operating system or computing platform, that system or platform is always evolving. And we all benefit from having a rich community of people working with us to evolve that technology Our experience has been that the reputation of the university, and of its faculty and students, is maximized when we work to engage a wide community in the process of helping us to move the technology forward.

Q5: What's the benefit of openness to a company like Intel that wants to commercialize the results of the research?

A5: By working closely with the university, by collaborating on research, a company like Intel gains the advantage of direct, early insight into the research and its implications. In information technology, the value of a year's advance notice, or even six months' advance notice, is profound because of the rate of change of the industry.

That value is important to the companies that collaborate with us, and it's partly why they support our research. Any company can have access to the results of open research, but the early insight gained by participating in the research puts a company like Intel in a better position to exploit the technology to create proprietary products. For example, Intel has already been able to translate the results of some of the research done at the Berkeley lab into products, such as the gateways they have developed for the "smart dust" nodes.

The reason that the "smart dust" platform is catching on as an industry is because it is open; if it were not open, it would not have caught on as quickly or in the same way. By supporting and enabling an ecosystem of researchers to explore "smart dust" and other highly distributed computing and sensing technology, Intel helps to ensure the technology will advance while putting itself in a better position to capitalize on the evolving market with proprietary products. So I think this is really a win-win situation.

Q6: Can the open and collaborative model be applied broadly to university-industry research?

A6: I truly believe that this is an important model for how best major corporations can invest in this new role of research universities in the 21st century, which can be thought of as a sort of "demilitarized zone" for research. Right now, the world is so competitive that while companies can and do invest in internal research activities, their ability to do so flexibly, and to invest the same percentage of their operating budgets as was the case in the days of major industrial labs such as Bell Labs, is significantly hindered.

By investing in research collaborations with universities through vehicles such as Intel Research Berkeley, companies can leverage the investment dollars that come from the federal government . Today in our College of Engineering, for every dollar a company invests in our research, our faculty are garnering approximately three dollars of federal support.

Another advantage is that by collaborating with the university, companies that might be competitors in other contexts are able to focus on a common interest in advancing certain interdependent technologies. This research is far enough out in the future that it does not represent a direct conflict in the marketplace. This research collaboration among companies at the university ultimately benefits us as citizens because it will lead to standards and other ideas that will improve the efficiency of products and services.

So I think this new and important role of the university as the 'DMZ' of research, if you will, is a critical one. I hope that, through Intel's example, other companies will see the advantage of the open and collaborative research model and begin to emulate more closely Intel's lead.

About Dean Newton

An Australian native, A. Richard Newton received the B.Eng. and M.Eng.Sci degrees from the University of Melbourne, Australia, in 1973 and 1975 respectively and his Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1978. He joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1979 and is currently Dean of the College of Engineering and the Roy W. Carlson Professor of Engineering at Berkeley. He is also a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, where he was Chair of the department from 1999-2000. Since 1979 he has been actively involved as a researcher and teacher in the areas of design technology, electronic system architecture, and integrated circuit design.

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