MSD recently announced it will close down the Organon research & development facilities in Oss, near the Netherlands university of Nijmegen. This came as a shock to many in the Netherlands. The departure of Organon is ‘a totally missed chance,’ said Michel Dutrée, head of the Dutch pharmaceutical organization Nefarma. ‘Now you see what happens if the government does not have a proper strategy for innovation.’ Dutrée told the Volkskrant, a major Dutch newspaper, he was concerned other pharmaceutical...

Thomas L. Friedman reminded us that “Invent, Invent, Invent” is the mantra to get us out of economic downturn. A surprising number of great companies, like General Electric, IBM, Kraft, McDonald’s, Walt Disney and Electronic Arts were formed in years that featured a recession, as did Motorola, HP,  Xerox, Unisys, Texas Instruments and Revlon.  The recession of the early 1990s hit much of the world. The rapid recovery from the recession and the growth of industrial output in Finland has been very much explained by...

The interaction between university, industry and government is key to innovation and growth. Innovation simply defined is “fresh thinking that creates value [1]“.  Capable of fresh thinking by the brightest minds, universities (or other knowledge producing institutions) still struggle whether the results of those thinking exercises are just part of academic freedom not to “do” anything with that other than for educational and scholarly purposes, or, use the results of this “fresh thinking”...

Every now and then the ipeg blog pays attention to innovation. Although some of our readers think this is not something for a patent blog (we recently were commented by a known blogger in the US that ipeg could not be counted among the top ten patent blogs as we publish not solely on patents and not ‘frequently” enough[1]), we think innovation is a subject worth paying attention to for a patent blog. Weren’t we told at university that patents spur innovation, a long held adagio that seems to be increasingly questioned these...

The movie Flash Of Genius (2008), the story of Robert Kearns, who owned a chain of auto-part stores and invented the intermittent windshield wiper and made his life story of suing Detroit carmakers over patent infringement, did not make it to European film houses. It did not even got attention in Europe as far as we can see. The movie is one of those rare occasions when Hollywood and intellectual property meet. It shows us historic tales of great inventors who did not get an easy income under their invention. In that respect...

“Invent, Invent, Invent” is today’s op-ed column of Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times. Can’t be more true. Monday Note gives an interesting overview of the inventions made during recession times: 1975, in the middle of a recession, The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) introduces the Alto, a computer featuring the first graphic user interface with windows, menus, and mouse. Four years later, Steve Jobs tours Xerox PARC and “inhales” the features we later saw into the Lisa and the Macintosh (other examples,...

The McKinsey Quarterly published an interesting read, “Memo to the CEO: Why we need an annual report for technology1 The idea is for a technology rich company to issue an annual report for technology analogous to the annual report for investors and the broader market. A take from the article: The annual report would provide an overview of the company’s ability to extract business value from technology but also substantiate that analysis with hard metrics, giving perspectives on the challenges of technology, …

The “Did You Know” video clip created by Karl Fisch, and modified by Scott McLeod, on globalization and the information age, got massive attention in blogs and on YouTube. The reason, I guess , is that old-school thinking must make room for out-of-the-box action on how to turn things around for the future.  Yet another, TechFutures also provides us with mind sharpening ideas on how to turn things around for the better.

Sadly, the IP community has for long failed to go out telling the non-IP world – not least the top management of companies and governments alike – in simple, understandable terms what crucial role IP plays and how underestimated its potential in international trade and economic growth is. And how we must change this. Here is an example. Technology development and technology transfer between the “have’s” and the “have-not’s” are key in obtaining global economic growth in …

In today’s Netherlands financial daily, Het Financieele Dagblad, the headline is that banks avoid financing of eco (energy saving)  projects. Investments planned for offshore wind energy production and construction of a biofuels plant have been stalled due to banks refusing to finance.  Banks will not lend because they fear borrowers will not repay; businesses will not borrow because they do not have adequate markets for their goods and services; individuals cannot and will not borrow because they do not have enough reliable...

When reading this month’s issue of IAM magazine (nr. 34), we came across a remark allegedly made by a senior IP executive at a major high-tech company, (“The patent transaction market at a crossroads“) asking himself “how can you justify buying patents when you are laying people off” .  A rather amazing statement from the mouth of someone who should know better. Two issues are being put in the equation here that really have little to do with each other. In recession times, when demand is low, companies...

Netherlands is known for its vast knowledge on water technology and water management skills, like off-shore civil engineering, flood control, coastal zone engineering, desalting for drinking water projects and industrial water supply projects. The Dutch battle against the sea resulted in major “Delta works”, they are known for their “impoldering” (land reclamation) . The Maeslantdam or “Maeslandkering” (two enormous steel constructions as lockable gates to the river Maas) are another example...

An interesting new read on the question whether patents stimulate innovation or rather hamper it: Boston University School of Law published a study by James E. Bessen and Michael J. Meurer. Do patents provide critical incentives to encourage investment in innovation? Or, instead, do patents impose legal risks and burdens on innovators that discourage innovation, as some critics now claim? This very interesting paper reviews empirical economic evidence on how well patents perform as a property system.

WIPO just published the statistics on patent filings 2007. “East Asia closes in on Europe in patent rankings”, writes FT this morning. At the same time Europe published its European Innovation Scoreboard 2007. On page 49 of that EU report it states: “One indicator of the rate of new product innovation is the number of patents.” Forget for the moment whether this is indeed true or not, so whether number of patents tell you something about innovation output. Asian countries surpass Europe in number of patent filings. What...

A little belated to report by blogger, but once again Booz Allen Hamilton published in December 2007 their “Global Innovation 1000” 2007 edition. Overall spending on research and development rose, to US$447 billion in 2007. The researchers found, as in 2006, no statistically significant connection between the amount of money a company spent on innovation and its financial performance. BAH selected a group of the Global Innovation 1000 companies, that spent a combined total of $68 billion on R&D in 2006. Through surveys...

An interesting study by Brent Allred and Walter Park, “Patent rights and innovative activity: Evidence from national and firm-level data”, published in the Journal of International Business Studies 38(6): 878-900, is one of those economist studies that shed some interesting light on the relationship between patents and innovation, a much underexplored area in Europe.read Roger Smeets’ summary of the study. Roger is a PhD student at the Nijmegen Centre for Economics (Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands).

BIZZ, the blog and magazine for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in The Netherlands, published by Reed Business provides a shortlist of the 100 most innovative companies in Holland for 2007, the “Innovatie Top 100” (“Innovation Top 100”). We wonder how many of the 10 most innovative companies have filed one or more patents for their invention. The – preliminary results – are at best scanty, at worst: troubling. We checked the data, using the database for the German Patent Office (Depatisnet) and Espacenet...

It has been said many times over: EU is not getting where “Lisbon” wants it to be by 2010. According to a study by Chambers– the EU organization of Chambers of Commerce – the EU lags behind the US in R&D spending. Not a new conclusion, both McKinsey and Booz Hamilton reached the alarm bell earlier. Saddest of all, Europe reaches only now the level of R&D investment per capita that the US already achieved in 1978. So how will 2010 look like? According to this figures Europe in 2010 will look like where the US...

This is the text of a lecture given by Severin de Wit on the occasion of DSM SPECIAL INVENTION REWARD 2006 on January 9, 2007 at Huis van de Toekomst in Rosmalen, Netherlands.     I am grateful to be able to witness today the grant of the DSM Special Invention Reward. This prestigious award is given to select DSM researchers whose exceptional scientific achievements have been patented and have created a distinct line of business for DSM. DSM’s most prestigious inventions and its creators are being celebrated today. It seems...