As an early-stage company, what is your Expected Value of pursuing a patent?
If you can’t answer that question, I don’t think it’s the right time to pursue one.
At Nebullam (rebranding to Clayton Farms), we still couldn’t answer that question a couple years and $20,000+ into pursuing patents.
So, as of July 2022, we’ve let our patent applications expire.
We believe there is WAY more upside (Expected Value) for us to go open source.
Why and how?
1. We build and grow in public.
a. What if we made our water usage public, from every farm location?
b. What if we made our fertilizer usage public, from every farm location?
c. What if we made our electricity usage public, from every farm location?
2. We think organizations such as Protocol Labs are better collaborators, who shares in our values. They were also the extra encouragement we needed to start moving toward open source, with their recent environmental project hackathon.
3. Thanks to our team members at Omni Analytics Group, we were able to immediately jump into building an open-source application that helps other indoor farms and data scientists utilize our data—and theirs—so we can all be learning together.
a. You can find more info on our application on GitHub, here.
b. You can access the prototype here.
c. We were fortunate enough to take 3rd place in Protocol Labs’ environmental hackathon, which has us feeling great and ready to keep building.
We have the opportunity to lead by example in the indoor farming space.
If you have the opportunity to lead by example in your space, you should consider taking that step. If it’s a step toward open sourcing, you’ll have more support than ever.