Intellectual Property and Patents: Knowledge Creation and Diffusion (original) (raw)
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Towards Understanding the Role and Value of Patents in a Knowledge-Based Economy
DAAAM International Scientific Book, 2013
Patent, as a form of intellectual property has existed for centuries with the underlying purpose of balancing between the interests of the inventor and those of the society and thus stimulating innovation, research and creativity. For a long time patents were mainly deployed for two fundamental strategic purposes -to sustain exclusion rights or in cross-licensing negotiations with competitors. However, with the entrance of non-producing patent dealers (e.g. Intellectual Ventures, Rambus, Rembrandt IP, Acacia Technologies) to the high technology market, the strategy of "being infringed" has emerged as the new stream in the strategic use of patents. Patent dealers have reached an exceptional growth rate in scale and scope of operations and today they significantly affect companies of all sizes in many industries, not only in the high technology sector. Moreover, the new strategy and new players changed the basic postulates in understanding the use and value of patents. This chapter is intended to review the role of patents in a knowledgebased economy and the various ways patents are used and valued today, to identify emerging trends and to outline the areas where further research is needed.
students.law.umich.edu
This paper attempts a critical assessment of both the theory and the empirical evidence on the role of appropriability and in particular of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) as incentives for technological innovation. We start with a critical discussion of the standard justification of the attribution of IPR in terms of "market failures" in knowledge generation. Such an approach we argue misses important features of technological knowledge and also neglects the importance of non-market institutions in the innovation process. Next, we examine the recent changes in the IPR regimes and their influence upon both rates of patenting and underlying rates of innovation. The evidence broadly suggests that, first, IPRs are not the most important device apt to "profit from innovation"; and second, they have at best no impact, or possibly even a negative impact on the underlying rates of innovation. Rather, we argued, technology-and industry-specific patterns of innovation are primarily driven by the opportunities associated with each technological paradigm. Conversely, firm-specific abilities to seize them and "profit from innovation" depend partly on adequacy of the strategic combinations identified by the taxonomy of Teece (1986) and partly on idiosyncratic capabilities embodied in the various firms.
Intellectual property rights in a knowledge-based economy
2001
Intellectual property rights (IPR) have been created as economic mechanisms to facilitate ongoing innovation by granting inventors a temporary monopoly in return for disclosure of technical knowhow. Since the beginning of 1980s, IPR have come under scrutiny as new technological paradigms appeared with the emergence of knowledge-based industries. Knowledge-based products are intangible, non-excludable and non-rivalrous goods. Consequently, it is difficult for their creators to control their dissemination and use. In particular, many information goods are based on network externalities and on the creation of market standards. At the same time, information technologies are generic in the sense of being useful in many places in the economy. Hence, policy makers often define current IPR regimes in the context of new technologies as both overand under-protective. They are over-protective in the sense that they prevent the dissemination of information which has a very high social value; they are under-protective in the sense that they do not provide strong control over the appropriation of rents from their invention and thus may not provide strong incentives to innovate. During the 1980s, attempts to assess the role of IPR in the process of technological learning have found that even though firms in high-tech sectors do use patents as part of their strategy for intellectual property protection, the reliance of these sectors on patents as an information source for innovation is lower than in traditional industries. Intellectual property rights are based mainly on patents for technical inventions and on copyrights for artistic works. Patents are granted only if inventions display minimal levels of utility, novelty and nonobviousness of technical know-how. By contrast, copyrights protect only final works and their derivatives, but guarantee protection for longer periods, according to the Berne Convention. Licensing is a legal aid that allows the use of patented technology by other firms, in return for royalty fees paid to the inventor. Licensing can be contracted on an exclusive or non-exclusive basis, but in most countries patented knowledge can be exclusively held by its inventors, as legal provisions for compulsory licensing of technologies do not exist. The fair use doctrine aims to prevent formation of perfect monopolies over technological fields and copyrighted artefacts as a result of IPR application. Hence, the use of patented and copyrighted works is permissible in academic research, education and the development of technologies that are complimentary to core technologies. Trade secrecy is meant to prevent inadvertent technology transfer to rival firms and is based on contracts between companies and employees. However, as trade secrets prohibit transfer of knowledge within industries, regulators have attempted to foster disclosure of technical know-how by institutional means of patents, copyrights and sui-generis laws. And indeed, following the provisions formed by IPR regulation, firms have shifted from methods of trade secrecy towards patenting strategies to achieve improved protection of intellectual property, as well as means to acquire competitive advantages in the market by monopolization of technological advances. This paper is drawn from a report commissioned by AWT (Adviesraad voor het Wetenschaps-en Technologiebeleid) published as AWT Background Study No. 21 (June, 2001).
2007
The economics of intellectual property rights is based on a narrow view of both competition and technological knowledge. In this paper we suggest some ways of enriching this framework with a more realistic and empirically based view of both and, by means of a simulation model, we investigate some consequences that different appropriability regimes could have in such a richer framework. Our main conclusion is that the implications of intellectual property rights for technological and industrial evolution and for social welfare are very much dependent upon specific characteristics of the competition process and of the underlying technological knowledge.
Study of the linkages between innovation and intellectual property
2009
The incredibly fast evolving information ecosystem has created porous boundaries across industries and its market, disrupting the traditional models of innovation and questioning the theory of intellectual property (IP) as the method of appropriation. The means of innovation are shifting from independent ownership to collaborative and service based. This paradigm shift in the innovation process has an impact on the three primary firm level processes namely: Strategic Management (SMP), Innovation Management (IMP) and Technology Development (TDP). IP has been considered as the major incentive that enables innovation and existing literature studies the linkage between innovation and IP from an individual perspective -economic, social, development or standards to name a few. Too often the interests of the producer dominate the evolution of an IP policy, and that of the ultimate consumer is neither heard nor heeded. Certain firms have aligned their IP management to the new emerging perspective in one of two ways -individual alignment of their business models [IBM, SU1, P&G, Google] or as a consortium of specific technologies [3GPP, WiMAX patent partnership, Green IP patent partnership]. What variables should the firm's IP management system be aware that can help strategise its market position by banking on innovation outputs? We propose a set of variables (nature of the good, essentiality of IP and open innovation) that are useful to identify the role of IP to determine the innovation outputs.
Patents, Trade Secrets and the Diffusion of Knowledge
2019
This paper focuses on how to design patents that facilitate knowledge diffusion via licensing and compares patents and trade secrets along this dimension. Licensing takes place under the threat of imitation, which can be abated via the threat of freeriding. When the cost of imitation is low free-riding delays imitation, but not when it is high. For patents diffusion depends both on the cost of imitation and the type of innovator. For producer innovators this cost acts as a fence against imitation, leading to limited diffusion. For non-producer innovators when this cost is intermediate diffusion is comprehensive. Trade secrets allow for greater R&D incentives but for minimal diffusion.