EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Patent policy: a need to focus both on appropriation and coordination failures

Julien Pénin (penin@unistra.fr)

No 20-11, Cahiers de recherche du Département des sciences économiques, UQAM from Université du Québec à Montréal, Département des sciences économiques

Abstract: Current innovation policies (including patents) are based on the traditional vision of knowledge, which assumes that knowledge circulates as fluently as pure information. The existence of knowledge spillovers leads to under investments in research activities and thus, calls for strong knowledge protection. This framework has led policy makers to focus mainly on appropriation problems. But, with the emergence of an evolutionist vision of knowledge, more competence based, innovation policies must be reconsidered: First, the lack of incentives may have been over estimated and second, the process of knowledge production involves not only an appropriation failure but a coordination failure too. Knowledge production is a social process and as such it requires the interactions of numerous agents and the perfect coordination of all these actors. In this way, the main benefit of patents may be that they can encourage the formation of collective form of production of knowledge because they signal where the knowledge is located while offering some protection for this knowledge. Hence, patents could solve both coordination and appropriation problems. But such a solution requires that the protection given by the patent is not too strong.

Keywords: Patent; knowledge spillovers; social interactions; innovation network; coordination failure (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L0 O0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21
Date: 2001-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-net and nep-tid
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in European Journal of Economic and Social System, vol. 16, pp. 109-128, 2003

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Journal Article: Patent policy: a need to focus both on appropriation and coordination failures (2003) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cre:uqamwp:20-11

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Cahiers de recherche du Département des sciences économiques, UQAM from Université du Québec à Montréal, Département des sciences économiques P.O. Box 8888, Downtown Station, Montreal (Canada) Quebec, H3C 3P8. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stéphane Pallage (pallage.stephane@uqam.ca).

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:cre:uqamwp:20-11