glory25 13 2004 8:25PM

you might check out delong and summers (2001) :D

"New institutions and new kinds of institutions--perhaps even some that have been tried before, like the French government's purchase and placing in the public domain of the first photographic patents in the early nineteenth century (see Kremer (1998))--may well be necessary to achieve the fourfold objectives of (a) price equal to marginal cost, (b) entrepreneurial energy, (c) accelerating the cumulative process of research, and (d) providing appropriate financial incentives for research and development. The work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer (1998, 2000), both with respect to the possibility of public purchase of patents at auction and of shifting some public research and development funding from effort-oriented to result-oriented processes (that is, holding contests for private companies to develop vaccines instead of funding research directly), is especially intriguing in its attempts to develop institutions that have all the advantages of market competition, natural monopoly, and public provision... It will be no surprise to you that at least one of the authors has been thinking very hard about the role that heavily-endowed non-profit educational institutions have to play in attempting to resolve the dilemmas of innovation and intellectual property in the new economy."

also re: elephant you might also want to check out zero day!