Roy Shalem
speaker
5 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Roy Shalem’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Freakonomics Radio · How to Succeed at Failing, Part 4: Extreme Resiliency (Update) · 21 May 2025
podcast
So what I'm trying to analyze is a situation in which firms are competing head-to-head in kind of a patent race.
One of the most famous examples is when Alexander Graham Bell and Alicia Gray both filed a patent for the telephone on the same day in 1876. Bell won the patent, started a successful company, now synonymous with telephone, while far fewer people remember Gray.
My paper proves that theoretically there is a potential for a market for R&D failure, When you sell knowledge of past failures, you are expected both to reduce the cost of R&D because you're not doing the same mistakes over and over again. And you also reduce the time until a discovery is made. So that's also worth money.
Basically, when you're doing something which is very hard, you mostly produce failures. And this is a very, very important part of the stock of knowledge. And so I think that it is possible to take all that knowledge and find the right price for a competitor to buy that knowledge.
If you think about a commodity trader, they have to have a bit of the wolf of Wall Street, a bit of James Bond and a lot of pirates of the Caribbean.
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