Long regarded as an essential underpinning of technological innovation in successful capitalist economies, the beneficial role of patents has recently been brought into question by those favouring 'open' innovation. This rigorous book surveys the theory, empirical evidence and public-policy related to the role of patents in a global knowledge economy.
The development of patent markets should allow for better circulation of knowledge and more efficient allocation of technologies at a global level. However, the beneficial role of patents has recently come under scrutiny by those favouring 'open' innovation, and important questions have been asked, namely: How can we estimate the value of patents? How do we ensure matching between supply and demand for such specific goods? Can these markets be competitive? Can we create a financial market for intellectual property rights? In this edited book, a team of authors addresses these key questions to bring readers up to date with current debates about the role of patents in a global economy. They draw on recent developments in economic analysis but also ground the discussion with the basics of patent and knowledge economics. Striking a balance between institutional analysis, theory and empirical evidence, the book will appeal to a broad readership of academics, students and practitioners.
Patents are powerful weapons in a company's legal arsenal, with both defensive and offensive capabilities. Patents protect a company's innovation from potential infringers, while at the same time support the company's efforts to exploit their innovation commercially in the global marketplace. This book explores the role of patents in today's knowledge economy. We discuss how patents have become a valuable commodity and have a lucrative market of their own. However, to profit from patent monetization, this Patent market must be closely linked to the R&D market and the Product Market.This book offers a systematic approach to patent deployment to maximize profits beginning with data collection from patent, journal and business sources. Readers will be guided through analyses of the patent landscape to identify traps and opportunities for commercialization. This book argues that patents must be aggregated into portfolios to maximize their effectiveness and value in the modern economy. With strong patent portfolios, companies can be engaged in licensing and more sophisticated business models like forming patent alliances and collaborating with IP intermediaries. Finally, the book will provide an overview of the various ways of valuing patents and suggest some simplified approaches for management to value the company's patents.
Intellectual property rights are a key element in today's knowledge economy. Specifically, the use of patents as transactional elements has become widespread. However, the market for patents possesses specific features that differentiate it from other markets. This book provides evidence for its existence and addresses its particular conditions. It also takes a deep dive into patent intermediaries, discussing how they emerged, their activity and business models, as well as their impact on market structure, firms, and societies. Patent intermediaries participate in market transactions by offering various services and by bridging supply and demand of patents. In the last decades, some of them (so-called pejoratively ‘patent trolls’) have become popular for their aggressive litigiousness. However, the activity and presence of patent intermediaries are much more significant. To enhance our understanding of the role of patent intermediaries, the authors provide a comprehensive review of the role of these agents in the Economy.
This is a major work by three international scholars at the cutting edge of new research that investigates the emerging set of complex relationships between creativity, design, research, higher education and knowledge capitalism. It highlights the role of the creative and expressive arts, of performance, of aesthetics in general, and the significant role of design as an underlying infrastructure for the creative economy. This book tracks the most recent mutation of these serial shifts - from postindustrial economy to the information economy to the digital economy to the knowledge economy to the 'creative economy' - to summarize the underlying and essential trends in knowledge capitalism and to investigate post-market notions of open source public space. The book hypothesizes that creative economy might constitute an enlargement of its predecessors that not only democratizes creativity and relativizes intellectual property law, but also emphasizes the social conditions of creative work. It documents how these profound shifts have brought to the forefront forms of knowledge production based on the commons and driven by ideas, not profitability per se; and have given rise to the notion of not just 'knowledge management' but the design of 'creative institutions' embodying new patterns of work.
This book opens a window into how two ambitious countries – India and Brazil – are seeking to become knowledge powers in the 21st century. As the knowledge economy became the preferred way of conceptualising the economy and its future direction, in the more economically-advanced countries, our search for understanding also followed the same direction. This generated a body of work that has neglected countries that, like India and Brazil, are attempting to make the leap into knowledge economies. Muzaka explores these motivations and the ways in which they have inspired a number of institutional reforms in India and Brazil. The author offers an investigation of the role the state in shaping the respective intellectual property systems pertaining to the pharmaceutical and agro-biotechnology sectors and the multiple social conflicts that have unfolded as a result.
What determines why some countries succeed and others fall behind? Economists have long debated the sources of economic growth, resulting in conflicting and often inaccurate claims about the role of the state, knowledge, patented ideas, monopolies, grand innovation prizes, and the nature of disruptive technologies. B. Zorina Khan's Inventing Ideas overturns conventional thinking and meticulously demonstrates how and why the mechanism design of institutions propels advances in the knowledge economy and ultimately shapes the fate of nations. Drawing on the experiences of over 100,000 inventors and innovations from Britain, France, and the United States during the first and second industrial revolutions (1750-1930), Khan's comprehensive empirical analysis provides a definitive micro-foundation for endogenous macroeconomic growth models. This groundbreaking study uses comparative analysis across time and place to show how different institutions affect technological innovation and growth. Khan demonstrates how top-down innovation systems, in which elites, state administrators, or panels make key economic decisions about prizes, rewards and the allocation of resources, prove to be ineffective and unproductive. By contrast, open-access markets in patented ideas increase the scale and scope of creativity, foster diversity and inclusiveness, generate greater knowledge spillovers, and enhance social welfare in the wider population. When institutions are associated with rewards that are misaligned with economic value and productivity, the negative consequences can accumulate and reduce comparative advantage at the level of individuals and nations alike. So who will arise as the global leader of the twenty-first century? The answer depends on the extent to which we learn and implement the lessons from the history of innovation and enterprise.
