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In the wake of growing pressures to make scholarly knowledge commercially relevant via translation into intellectual property, various techno-scientific communities have mobilized to create open access/open source experiments. These efforts are based on the ideas and success of free and open source software, and generally try to exploit two salient features: increased openness and circulation, and distributed collective innovation. Transferring these ideas from software to science often involves unforeseen challenges, one of which is that these movements can be deemed, often incorrectly, as heretical by university administrators and technology transfer officers who valorize metrics such as number of patents filed and granted, spin-off companies created, and revenue generated. In this paper, we discuss nascent efforts to foster an open source movement in nanotechnology and provide an illustrative case of an arsenic removal invention. We discuss challenges facing the open source nano movement that include making a technology widely accessible and the associated politics of metrics.

This volume centers on introducing and exploring issues of and approaches to demonstrating the potential nonexclusively commercial values of individual university innovations, such as social, ecological, and economic values of innovation that may be realized through movement to the private marketplace. The volume papers comprised the basis for discussion and formation of a 2008 colloquium that was conceptualized and organized by the McGuire Center for Entrepreneurship and co-hosted by the McGuire Center and the Office of Technology Transfer at The University of Arizona. The goal of the colloquium and conference volume was to increase university-based ability to advance innovation by conducting technology-specific assessments of the social (and other noncommercial) gains of the individual innovation. New technologies and knowledge sets generated by university faculty are most frequently measured for potential academic value by the innovating faculty member, department, and general peer structure, and for potential commercial value when appropriate by technology transfer offices and other market-oriented units that are charged with the management of the intellectual property of the institution. A formal, institutionally supported valuation of the social, ecological, and/or economic potential of individual innovations may provide evidence of gain needed to motivate more parties to become engaged in academic entrepreneurship. Thus, the capacities of colleges and universities to more confidently forecast the noncommercial value of new knowledge and discovery has the potential to act as an additional link in the often disconnected value proposition of university innovation.