Resources,Rights and Communities: Extractive Mega-Projects and Local People in the Russian Arctic

Industry in the twenty-first century advances to ever-remoter regions, seen as ‘periphery’ from the point of view of headquarters and capital cities, while for local people these areas are the core of their world. This article investigates the encounter between communities, regulatory authorities and industry in the Russian Arctic. Using cases from Sakha (Yakutiya), we analyse how communities organise for coexistence of traditional livelihoods with big industrial projects in what we call state-led resource development. Our analysis shows the surprising room for agency that development agendas in a centralised state nonetheless leave for local people so far.     

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.     

The influence of standards and patents on long-term economic growth

The Journal of Technology Transfer - Formal standards codify knowledge. Next to patents representing the generation of innovative knowledge, standards can hence be used to proxy the diffusion of...