I find in searching patents, you get distracted with all the seemingly pretty good ideas that for some reason appear nowhere in the marketplace. I wondered if it might be fun to create free implementations of patents that are commercially unimplemented (for whatever the strategic reasons might be). There certainly seems to be enough people out there capable of doing almost anything. The space is there to build prototypes. The end product (i.e. a reference design) would be freely available and therefore not in violation of any patents.
Maybe the hackspace guys could create an administrative process for vetting and accepting project proposals, a process of forming a project group, and assigning a project manager. Each group would fund or resource itself and operate in a organizational structure that would be predetermined. I think once that is established, things will start moving and there would be a lot of valuable experience being created. This could also attract financial support and so the snowball rolls …