知识产权制度的未来

知识经济的发展和数字网络的兴起使知识的创新与传播日益多样化，深刻地改变了知识产权制度的生态环境。生态环境的巨大变化进一步暴露了知识产权制度的先天缺陷，使知识产权制度面临前所未有的危机和挑战，改革现有知识产权制度与探索知识产权制度的补充或替代成为必然。知识创新激励制度的多样性、可替换性与环境适应性表明，单一制度无法提供所有知识领域的最佳激励，多元化成为未来知识产权制度的必然选择。     

体育动作可专利性法律问题研究

体育产业化要求利用知识产权保护体育运动参与者的经济利益。体育动作的不断革新要求对引入专利保护进行研究。通过分析专利制度法律规定和体育动作的特性发现,体育动作具有受到专利保护的可能性。但是,通过专利保护体育动作仍然需要克服许多困难,只有体育产业和法律制度能够良好的协调和互动,才能通过体育动作的专利保护促进体育运动的进步和体育产业的健康发展。     

Patent cross-licensing,the influence of IP interdependency and the moderating effect of firm size

This paper analyzes technological interdependency as the key factor for companies’ motivation to engage in cross-licensing transactions. It gives evidence on how the incentive effects for mutual technology transfers vary by firm size and the degree to which a firm has to rely on its competitors’ intellectual property (IP dependency). Even though IP dependency exists also among smaller firms, cross-licensing has previously only been analyzed for large firms. This paper fills this gap in the empiric literature using original survey data among German manufacturing companies. Findings suggest that the influence of firm size and IP dependency on the use of cross-licensing can not be regarded separately. While the effect of IP dependency on the relevance of cross-licensing itself has a clear positive effect this seems to be true to a higher extent for small firms and decrease for larger companies. A possible reason for the interaction effect between these two factors is that larger firms have better odds of achieving a technological workaround which can serve as an alternative to in- or cross-licensing; furthermore small high tech firms might need to explicitly use cross-licensing to secure the freedom to operate while a large firm’s patent portfolio itself can serve as an implicit insurance by posing a threat which prevents other technology holders to file patent infringement cases.     

University knowledge and firm innovation: evidence from European countries

In recent decades, firms have intensified the exploration of external sources of knowledge to enhance their innovation capabilities. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the factors that affect the importance of academic knowledge for firms’ innovation activities. An integrated approach that simultaneously considers country- and firm-level factors is adopted. Regarding the former factors, the analysis shows that the entrepreneurial orientation of university and the quality of academic research increase the importance of knowledge transfers from universities to firms. This suggests that the environmental and institutional context contributes to cross-national disparities in university-industry interactions and the effectiveness of knowledge transfer. In regard to the latter factors, the results indicate that firms oriented toward open search strategies and radical innovations are more likely to draw knowledge from universities. Furthermore, firms belonging to high technology sectors and firms with high absorptive capacity place greater value on the various links with universities. With respect to firm size, the estimates show an inverted U-shaped relation with the importance of universities as a source of knowledge.     

Empowering young inventors: an experimental course on IP and patent application drafting at Auburn University

A new one-credit course on IP and patent application drafting was offered at Auburn University jointly by the authors in spring 2009. The course started with a target of 15 students. Within 1 week of its announcement, the course was oversubscribed; the class was filled within a week of its announcement through e-mails to engineering and business students, a few were turned down, 16 were enrolled including one MS and one Ph.D. student from engineering (graduate students were required to do an additional term paper). The goal of this first-of-its-kind course at Auburn was to teach undergraduate and graduate students to understand the protection of intellectual property rights, and to train them to prepare a patent application fit for submission to the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The hands-on experience was intended to give them the freedom to grab their own new ideas and protect them through patents as a first step towards the commercial exploitation of their intellectual property (IP). The paper explains the limited goals of the course, outcome and conclusions with a recommendation for other universities to offer a similar course. The course fulfilled an important need and empowered some of the young inventors in the class to consider venturing into a new business based on their product ideas.     

遏制专利蟑螂——评美国专利新政及其对中国的启示

2013年6月4日,美国奥巴马政府宣布了旨在打击专利蟑螂、提高专利质量、促进专利创新的5项行政措施和7项立法意见。同一天,总统行政办公室发布报告《专利主张与美国创新》,描述并分析了采取立法及行政措施的必要性。美国国会2012年和2013年两度提出旨在遏制专利蟑螂恶意诉讼的《保护高技术创新者免遭恶意诉讼法案》。这些举措,意味着美国正在推行专利新政。结合中国国情,提出以下6项建议:(1)建立知识产权危机预警机制;(2)提高专利审查质量;(3)跟踪专利实施情况;(4)健全专利服务体系;(5)加强知识产权领域反垄断规制;(6)限定专利诉讼主体资格。     

论专利危机及其解决路径

专利制度作为知识经济时代最重要的财产权制度,却面临专利失灵或专利危机的指责。梳理现有文献所揭示的、专利法中可能存在阻碍创新的制度因素,实为完善专利理论及制度所必要。专利危机主要表现为：专利商业化程度低、专利权利滥用、累积创新领域的创新受阻、专利丛林、专利竞赛导致的资源浪费、专利授权质量太差、专利制度的人权困境和发展鸿沟,等等。其相应的专利改革方案包括：一方面,国内法上主要体现为改善专利授权质量问题、提升专利的有效利用;另一方面：对于国际因素所导致的专利问题,主要的观点是应该发挥国家在专利政策制定上的适度自主性。     

Impact of university intellectual property policy on the performance of university-industry research collaboration

Despite the expectation of various advantages, university-industry research collaboration (UIC), a relationship between two different worlds, often faces serious conflicts. The performance of UIC depends on the research partners’ strategies and institutional designs through which they seek to mitigate these conflicts and increase partner incentives. We pay special attention to the role of the university intellectual property (IP) policy, formally introduced to Japan in 2003, as the basis of UIC contracts and empirically examine its impact on the performance of UIC projects, considering the factors in firms’ participation in UIC. We argue that the university IP policy that is equitable in sharing revenue and royalty from innovative outcomes and applied flexibly according to the partner’s needs may contribute to improving project performance by enhancing the commitment of firms, and we test our hypotheses using a sample of Japanese firms obtained from our original survey. The estimation results support the hypotheses, although the mediation via the firm’s commitment only partially explains the relationship between the university IP policy and UIC performance.     

Patent laws and innovation in China

This paper explores whether the patent laws and intellectual property rights (IPR) system in China have resulted in innovation during the reform period. Subject to criticism on account of imperfect enforcement, the patent law system has produced a stock of patents which has grown rapidly alongside economic growth. The success rate of patent applications is similar across the country despite the considerable regional disparities in income and in the level of innovation. This paper presents a simple model of patent production in China derived from the patent law system that also considers the relevant contextual factors that could influence innovation. The main innovation input of R&D personnel is found to be a significant determinant of patents. While per capita GDP increases the propensity to innovate across all regions, notable heterogeneity exists whereby the coastal, central and interior areas are associated with different factors that produce innovation and influence the innovation process. The paper concludes that China's imperfect IPR system is nevertheless generating innovation as the country develops and hinges on the key factor of researchers.     

The growth of China’s technology transfer industry over the next decade: implications for global markets

China has moved mightily over the last 30 years to increase its capacity to develop indigenous technology to invigorate its industrial base and shift it from the world’s factory to the world’s developer and manufacturer of products. To achieve this requires buttressing an emerging intellectual property system, increasing university research while encouraging scientists to patent and commercialize their discoveries. Additionally, the development of a functioning and agile venture capital system to invest in these new technologies, coupled with liquid equity markets for consummating IPO’s have been developed in record time. Will these remarkable efforts be sufficient to allow China to dominate the technology transfer market domestically or internationally over the next 10 years? The conclusions are twofold: on one hand, China undoubtedly will become the world’s largest customer for technology transfers both domestically and internationally, but global leadership in new technology development and licensing from research institutions is unlikely to be achieved over the next 10 years. Foreign firms, especially those within the US or with strong ties to the US are most likely to dominate this sector due to the US’s comprehensive university network coupled with its well established IP technology transfer industry.     

Absorptive capacity and post-acquisition inventor productivity

Inventors often experience a low productivity after their company has been subject to a merger or acquisition (M&As). It is of central managerial interest to identify factors facilitating the integration of new inventive staff and thereby counteracting innovation declines after M&As. This paper provides empirical evidence into the role of acquiring firms?? absorptive capacity for the post-merger patent productivity of the acquired inventors. Based on a sample of 544 inventors employed by European acquisition targets in the period 2000?C2001 it is shown that the post-merger productivity of acquired inventors is significantly higher within acquiring firms with a distinct absorptive capacity. It can be concluded that absorptive capacity is a firm capability that enhances the integration of inventors after firm takeovers.     

Linking technological and educational level diversities to innovation performance

In this study, we explore the extent to which diversity of educational levels among research scientists and engineers (RSEs) in the context of a firm’s level of technological diversity influences innovation performance. We used data from the 2004–2008 National R&D Survey in Singapore. The results from 366 firms across different industries indicate that when a firm’s technological domains are heterogeneous, those firms with an RSE workforce comprising similar educational levels have positive innovation performance, measured as the number of patent applications, while those comprising diverse educational levels have negative innovation performance. Our further exploration of the positive interaction between technological domain heterogeneity and similarity of educational levels suggests that firms that had a high ratio of RSEs with lower educational levels had more positive patent outcomes compared to those that had a high ratio of RSEs with higher educational levels. The results show that there are limits to the strength of technological diversity in a firm’s absorptive capacity as explained by organizational demography.     

Intellectual property (IP) management: organizational processes and structures, and the role of IP donations

This paper examines intellectual property (IP) management in U.S. companies and addresses three questions: What are typical sources of IP? How do companies manage IP? What role do donations of IP play in IP management? We used in-depth interviews and an on-line survey to gather data. We found that firms develop their IP position from a wide variety of sources such as joint ventures, acquisitions, and consulting contracts, but internal development is still the primary source of IP. Organizationally, three structural archetypes of IP management were identified: a centralized structure, a purely decentralized IP structure and a compromise structure involving a divisional assignment where a multi-business unit or division committee oversees IP. IP donations clearly do not appear to be a major phenomenon at the present time. Our survey results suggest that tax benefits are an important driver and that recent tax law changes have diminished the incentives to donate IP. The uncertainty of tax benefits and the costs associated with IP valuation appear to be the main disincentives.     

Slack resources,exploratory and exploitative innovation and the performance of small technology-based firms at incubators

This paper aims to contribute (1) to the understanding about how small technology-based firms in spite of being constrained by limited resources, can still perform exploratory and exploitative innovation and (2) to extend knowledge about the role of slack resources in the context of small technology-based firms in facilitating those innovation activities. Herein, we focus on two types of slack resources: internal slack, resources that are available within the firms and external slack, additional resources that are gathered through the facilitation of external sources such as business incubators. Using a sample of 141 small technology-based firms located at incubators, this study combined two streams of research on incubator studies and innovation to construct some hypotheses examining the role of slack resources and innovation activities in enhancing the performance of small technology-based firms operating in incubator setting. Our findings demonstrate that neither slack resources nor innovation activities alone explain firm performance. Instead, small technology-based firms fit their innovation activities to their slack resources. While the relationship between internal slack and performance is mediated by exploitative innovation, exploratory innovation plays a role as a mediator for the relationship between external slack and performance.     

The antecedents and innovation outcomes of firms’ absorptive capacity in global buyer–supplier relationships

This article seeks to address two fundamental questions: (1) Does social capital (SC) embedded in global buyer–supplier (GBS) relationships enhance local firms’ potential absorptive capacity (PAC) and realized absorptive capacity (RAC)? And (2) What are the effects of local firms’ PAC and RAC on their innovation outcomes? Based on survey data collected from 297 Chinese firms engaged in GBS cooperation in China’s Yangtze River Delta region, we test our research hypotheses with the structural equation modelling approach. The empirical findings indicate that both structural and relational SC are important antecedents of PAC and RAC in global buyer–supplier relationships. More specifically, RAC not only improves local suppliers’ new product performance, but also fully mediates the relationship between PAC and new product performance. Our results have two major implications for practicing managers. First, local suppliers in emerging economies need to pay more attention to SC embedded in GBS relationships for it is an important means for them to overcome resource constraints and therefore to improve their new product performance. Second, it is important for managers in local firms to continuously improve their PAC to better assess and assimilate external knowledge, and extend their RAC to upgrade their interpretation and comprehension of commercialization possibilities, which allows for generating synergy of knowledge recombination with existing core competencies.     

What drives patenting and commerzialisation activity at East German universities? The role of new public policy, institutional environment and individual prior knowledge

New public policy enacted in Germany in 2002, intends to increase the number of patent registrations of academic entrepreneurs, and facilitate the commercialization and spillover of innovation generated at public universities. Results from a survey amongst university patentees in two new German Laender, Thuringia and Saxony, accomplished in 2009, are reported focusing on government policy, university support, and the role of technology transfer in an organizational and cultural context. Using a two-step cluster analysis, the survey data are used to profile the patentees and to investigate whether personal attributes and institutional environment contribute to academic entrepreneurship. Empirical findings show that advanced age and non-university working experience contribute significantly to entrepreneurial behavior. New public policy contributes to facilitate patent registrations, but professional expertise for the commercialization of knowledge as well as financial and organizational support schemes needs further improvement. This explains why patent registrations have slightly increased but also why universities report very low levels of commercialization through entrepreneurship. We offer policy recommendations to overcome the existent barriers, among them, the professionalization of technology transfer or targeted marketing for registered patents.     

试论新时代我国知识产权的保护与运用

新时代我国知识产权保护和运用呈现出专利授权总量与申请强度持续增长、商标注册高度活跃、专利实施率较高、知识产权行政保护与司法保护体系不断增强等新特征,但与此同时也面临着专利质量和发明专利实施率有待提高、知识产权交易市场活跃程度不足、新业态和新领域创新成果的知识产权保护滞后等一系列问题。应构建以专利质量为核心的知识产权政策体系,打造新形势下的知识产权海外预警与保护平台,推进新业态和新领域创新成果的知识产权保护,继续强化中小企业知识产权保护与援助工作,系统加强知识产权保护与运用。     

Quadruple Helix and firms’ performance: an empirical verification in Europe

The emerging relationships connecting organizations are the condition on which innovation is founded nowadays, so it is pivotal to achieve a vaster comprehension of the phenomenon through the exploitation of new dynamics and the exploration of new trajectories. In line with the Quadruple Helix (QE) approach, it seems reasonable to expect that the different environments in which firms operate would highlight the expectations of the various market governance systems, which firms must comply with in order to gain social legitimacy and improve their capacity for survival. To determine whether the Quadruple Helix model has an effect on the firms’ profitability, the authors employed the classification analysis method (Classification And Regression Trees). The sample is composed by 4215 manufacturing firms located in science parks. In our empirical model, the variable “citizen” classifies businesses with high Return On Investment in the best way. This shows that in science parks “the fourth helix” (citizen) has an important role in classifying the firms with the highest performance. Moreover, the majority of firms that attribute high importance to the collaboration with private financial institutions in order to finance innovations have a high ROI. In addition, firms with high economic performance in the model of the quadruple helix generate product innovation.     

National innovation systems and the globalization of nanotechnology innovation

While there has been much emphasis over the last decade on the science of nanotechnology and on the implications and risks of potential applications, it is now timely to increase attention to the emerging dynamics of nanotechnology commercialization. This paper examines, from a global perspective, where and how corporations are entering into nanotechnology innovation. The paper tests the proposition that a significant shift has occurred in recent years in the orientation of corporate nanotechnology activities—from research discovery to patented applications. It also examines the extent to which the character and structure of corporate nanotechnology activity by country initially reflects national innovation system characteristics and prior public research funding inputs in the stage when discovery is most emphasized. The results indicate that national innovation systems characteristics are significant factors in the commercialization shift of nanotechnology and highlight the importance of innovation system policy factors. We also observe the influence of cross-border international invention linkages, suggesting that national innovation policies also need to be open and international in orientation.     

Ambidexterity,external knowledge and performance in knowledge-intensive firms

The paper investigates the relationship between organizational ambidexterity and firm performance in knowledge-intensive firms. In particular, using a quantitative methodology involving a structural equation model, the research investigates whether external knowledge sourcing enhances the impact of ambidexterity on firm performance. The results show that organizational ambidexterity in knowledge-intensive firms does not, in fact, have a significant impact on firm performance, but it does have a positive and significant mediating effect considering external knowledge sourcing. The findings are presented along with interesting and significant implications for both theory and practice, largely stemming from the still much neglected relationship between organizational ambidexterity and external knowledge sourcing in the open innovation context.