Article history: Received 8 January 2008 Accepted 18 December 2008 Available online 24 June 2009 Over the past two decades, there has been a substantial shift in the global innovation landscape. Multinationals from developed economies are increasingly globalizing their R&D activities and are developing an “open innovation” model to source innovations from outside the firm, including from emergi...

The paper examines possible reasons behind expanded outsourcing by modeling outsourcing decisions when intellectual property rights are imperfectly protected. Firms in the North develop higher quality levels of existing products and then decide whether to shift some stages of production to the South. Production in the South lowers costs but entails risk of imitation by Southern firms. In this s...

Technological or institutional change has proven to be big cause for failure of established firms and history is full of such examples. The stregnhthening of patent laws as a result of TRIPs (Trade Related intellectual property rights) agreement represents such a institutional change for knowledge based industries from developing countries. This represents a radical break with the past in which...

The main rationale for intellectual property relies on the thesis of the incentive to create. Creators and inventors are economic agents attracted by the returns they expect from their effort. This depiction is practical, but does not give due weight to the complexity of knowledge production. This work does not contest the potential benefit of the opportunity for creators and inventors to reap ...

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The purpose of the seminar was to discuss matters related to intellectual property rights (IPRs) and the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (the TRIPS Agreement) including recent developments in the area with particular emphasis on their implications for sustainable development. During the seminar four experts on IPR issues gave short presentations in which they ...

This paper analyzes an area that economic analysis of intellectual property has generally ignored, namely, the effects of intellectual property rights on the relative desirability of various strategies for organizing information production. I suggest that changes in intellectual property rules alter the payoffs to information production in systematic and predictable ways that differ as among di...

Open collaboration and sharing of information among scientists at scientific meetings can foster innovation and discovery. However, such sharing can be at odds with potential patenting and commercialization objectives. This tension may be mitigated if certain procedures are followed in the context of scientific meetings. The article first discusses what makes a scientific finding patentable and...