Posted by ipeg on May 19th, 2013
To invent means to produce or contrive something previously unknown by the use of ingenuity or imagination. An inventor is therefore someone who invents, someone who devises some new process, appliance, machine, or article. When a new product appears, the person who first thought of it, and who first defined what the product should be, is recognised as the inventor. While many people may be involved in building the product and bringing it to market, the innovator is the person who provided the original idea that helped to define and shape...
Posted by ipeg on October 19th, 2012
The Max-Planck-Institute for Intellectual Property and Competition Law, which has functioned as a politically and economically unbiased centre of legal competence for European intellectual property legislation ever since its foundation in 1966, is a well-recognized scientific commentator and advisor on the evolution of European patent law.
The Institute considers a balanced, innovation-friendly and uniform patent system as being indispensable for Europe. However, the current patent package is deemed to be both dangerous and misguided....
Posted by ipeg on May 12th, 2011
A recently published paper by Dr. Gaetan de Rassenfosse explains how firms can use their patents to finance innovation [1]. He argues that patents aimed at monetization of IP is more important for SMEs than for large companies and reports evidence that European SMEs face more difficulties than SMEs in the US to benefit from their patents. Dr. de Rassenfosse is a research fellow at the University of Melbourne and the IP Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) [2].
Financial constraints are particularly acute for SMEs
From a theoretical...
Posted by ipeg on June 6th, 2010
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 success...
Posted by ipeg on March 28th, 2010
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” to bring...
Posted by ipeg on December 21st, 2009
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 days,...
Posted by ipeg on June 28th, 2009
“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, see LayLow...
Posted by ipeg on March 31st, 2009
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.
Posted by ipeg on November 21st, 2008
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Nov. 6 the first of a possible series of public hearings to explore the evolving market for intellectual property (IP). The hearings will be held beginning on December 5, 2008, in Washington, DC. The FTC will examine changes in IP law, patent-related business models, and new learning about the operation of the IP marketplace since the issuance in October 2003 of the Commission report To Promote Innovation: The Proper Balance of Competition and Patent Law and Policy.
A great initiative and...
Posted by ipeg on April 15th, 2008
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.
