What if there was a way to give legs to ideas?
There is a saying that good ideas have their own legs. I don't think that's true. The success of an idea depends on something very close to a market. At any given time there are people willing to buy into new ideas, and just like any market, there is demand and supply. When demand is scarce, the idea needs to be worth more than others.
In other words, every idea has legs, but some legs are shorter than others. What drives demand? The same things that drive other markets. Politics, years, seasons...
Is every idea worth pursuing? It is hard to gauge if an idea is worth or not, but some people are better at spotting good ideas, others are better at applying good ideas. This means that an actual market for ideas, yet to be gestated, can make sense, because that's what markets are good at, finding how much something is worth.
Tokenizing an idea means, that you have some form of right to the idea itself. This starts to look a lot like patents on the blockchain. But patents is not something I am fond of, yet incentivizing price discovery for yet to be implemented ideas is definitely (an idea!) that I think is worth implementing.
How to avoid patent trolling? Patent trolling is the outcome of loose rules applied to patents, the hope is that since the crypto space ethos, is to follow protocol, the definition of patents would follow a much stricter regime that minimizes grey areas.
Tokenizing an idea also means to split an idea into multiple shares and sell them on the market. What happens when an idea is held by multiple parties? The chances of patent trolling go down because every share holder would have to be dishonest and willing to pursue patent trolling, coordination costs are good against patent trolling!
I would picture every idea, as a smart contract that mints a token. Every token holder has share vote to initialize a yield request against another smart contract that is supposedly making use of the intellectual property captured by the "idea token". Such requests would be cleared by third-parties, like kleros. This is the incentive, that is, the voting rights to instantiate yielding, and accruing such yields if accepted by the third-party.
