Digital Commons Network^™

3d Printing And Healthcare: Will Laws, Lawyers, And Companies Stand In The Way Of Patient Care?, Evan R. Youngstrom

Evan R. Youngstrom

Today, our society is on a precipice of significant advancement in healthcare because 3D printing will usher in the next generation of medicine. The next generation will be driven by customization, which will allow doctors to replace limbs and individualize drugs. However, the next generation will be without large pharmaceutical companies and their justifications for strong intellectual property rights. However, the current patent system (which is underpinned by a social tradeoff made from property incentives) is not flexible enough to cope with 3D printing’s rapid development. Very soon, the social tradeoff will no longer benefit society, so it must be …

Through The Lens Of Innovation, Mirit Eyal-Cohen

Mirit Eyal-Cohen

The legal system constantly follows the footsteps of innovation and attempts to discourage its migration overseas. Yet, present legal rules that inform and explain entrepreneurial circumstances lack a core understanding of the concept of innovation. By its nature, law imposes order. It provides rules, remedies, and classifications that direct behavior in a consistent manner. Innovation turns on the contrary. It entails making creative judgments about the unknown. It involves adapting to disarray. It thrives on deviations as opposed to traditional causation. This Article argues that these differences matter. It demonstrates that current laws lock entrepreneurs into inefficient legal routes. Using …

Licensing And Innovation With Imperfect Contract Enforcement, Richard J. Gilbert, Eirik Gaard Kristiansen

Richard J Gilbert

Licensing promotes technology transfer and innovation, but enforcement of licensing contracts is often imperfect. We explore the implications of weak enforcement of contractual commitments on the licensing conduct of firms and market performance. An upstream firm develops a technology that it can license to downstream firms using a fixed fee and a per-unit royalty. Strictly positive per-unit royalties maximize the licensor's profit if competition among licensees limits joint profits. Although imperfect contract enforcement lowers the profits of the upstream firm, weak enforcement lowers prices, increase downstream innovation, and in some circumstances can increase total economic welfare.

The Evolution Of Innovation And The Evolution Of Regulation: Emerging Tensions And Emerging Opportunities In Communications, John W. Mayo

John W Mayo

Changes to an industry’s core technologies inevitably create tension for regulatory institutions. This is true for any sector experiencing persistent disruptive innovation, and that has been the defining feature of the communications industry for the last two decades or longer. In very short order, a century of switched voice communication networks have been supplanted by new, packet-based voice, video and data networks, rendering both the legal and regulatory framework hammered out for the switched-voice era increasingly strained. This incongruity has created tangible regulatory asymmetries. Wireline telephony provided by a “telco” is regulated by the Federal Communications Commission under Title II …

Export, R&D And New Products. A Model And A Test On European Industries, Dario Guarascio, Mario Pianta, Francesco Bogliacino

Mario Pianta

In this article we extend the model developed by Bogliacino and Pianta (2013a, 2013b) on the link between R&D, innovation and economic performance, considering the impact of innovation of export success. We develop a simultaneous three equation model in order to investigate the existence of a ‘virtuous circle’ between industries’ R&D, share of product innovators and export market shares. We investigate empirically – at the industry level – three key relationships affecting the dynamics of innovation and export performance: first, the capacity of firms to translate their R&D efforts in new products; second, the role of innovation as a determinant …

Linking Development And Innovation: What Does Technological Change Bring To The Society?, Evgeny A. Klochikhin

Evgeny A. Klochikhin

Recently, there has been a popular trend in academic research for paying more attention to ‘pro-poor’ policies and theoretical studies. This tradition has emerged from a broader understanding of development that includes not only economic but also social and political dimensions. Meanwhile, innovation researchers are still considering development as mere economic growth without much focus on the social impacts of technological change. This article recognizes that, despite these fundamental differences, the concepts of innovation and development have much in common and are, in fact, positively connected and mutually beneficial. This assumption has some important implications for the innovation and development …

Public Policy Instruments In (Re)Building National Innovation Capabilities: Cases Of Nanotechnology Development In China, Russia And Brazil, Evgeny A. Klochikhin

Evgeny A. Klochikhin

In 2001 Goldman Sachs named Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs) the most rapidly-growing countries in the world capable of surpassing the United States, Japan and Europe as leading economies by 2050.

Nevertheless, for the last decade we have learned relatively little about the mechanisms of success and failure in these countries. All of them have huge territory and population as well as fast-growing economies that sometimes show two-digit rates of GDP growth per year and surprise the world by their increasing budgets and public spending. In the meantime, most of these countries are believed to be desperately struggling against …

Negotiating For The Market, Joshua S. Gans

Joshua S Gans

In a dynamic environment where underlying competition is ‘for the market,’ this paper examines what happens when entrants and incumbents can negotiate for the market. For instance, this might arise when an entrant innovator can choose to license to or be acquired by an incumbent firm; i.e., engage in cooperative commercialization. It is demonstrated that, depending upon firms’ dynamic capabilities, there may or may not be gains to trade between incumbents and entrants in a cumulative innovation environment; that is, entrants may not be adequately compensated for losses in future innovative potential. This stands in contrast to static analyses that …

Innovation Cooperation: Energy Biosciences And Law, Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

Prof. Elizabeth Burleson

This Article analyzes the development and dissemination of environmentally sound technologies that can address climate change. Climate change poses catastrophic health and security risks on a global scale. Universities, individual innovators, private firms, civil society, governments, and the United Nations can unite in the common goal to address climate change. This Article recommends means by which legal, scientific, engineering, and a host of other public and private actors can bring environmentally sound innovation into widespread use to achieve sustainable development. In particular, universities can facilitate this collaboration by fostering global innovation and diffusion networks.

Innovazione, Qualifiche, Salari: Una Rassegna Critica., Stefano Supino

Stefano Supino

This paper reviews recent developments in the analysis of innovation, skills and wages. It discuss some problems and puzzles affecting the emerging neoclassical literature on these topics. Several shortcoming are identified, from poor structural models to excessive reliance on traditional proxies of innovation activities. The paper claims that in investigating the skills and wages impact of innovation, mainstream economics lost some useful insight from Schumpeterian tradition. It concludes that a more correct approach to labour market impact of innovation could benefits from a recovery of Schumpeterian legacy and a more attentive use of Innovation Surveys as a tool to investigate …

Innovation And Climate Change Policy, Joshua S. Gans

Joshua S Gans

This paper examines then notion that more stringent climate change policy will induce innovation in environmentally friendly technologies. While past work has been concerned that such policies may stimulate such innovation at the expense of innovation elsewhere in the economy, the model presented here challenges the presumption that environmentally friendly innovation will be increased. It is demonstrated that a tighter emissions cap will reduce the scale of fossil fuel usage and that this effect will diminish incentives to improve fossil fuel efficiencies. At the same time, such policies may stimulate innovation that improves the efficiency of alternative energy but that …

Innovazione Tecnologica, Organizzazione E Produttività Nella Manifattura Italiana: Evidenze Recenti Per L’Area Nec, Riccardo Cappelli, Nicola Matteucci

Nicola Matteucci

Recenti statistiche evidenziano che il problema della bassa crescita ed efficienza dell’Italia risiede principalmente nella dinamica della produttività totale dei fattori (total factor productivity, o TFP), in netto peggioramento proprio nel settore manifatturiero. Inoltre, tra le spiegazioni del supposto declino economico ed industriale dell’Italia, quelle che si concentrano sulle variabili tecnologico-organizzative sembrano tornare in primo piano, anche alla luce del dibattito sulla “strategia di Lisbona”. Questi temi sono ricollegabili al dibattito sull’evoluzione strutturale e organizzativa del modello NEC e sulle sue capacità di risposta alle sfide dell’economia globale. Il presente lavoro studia l’evoluzione della relazione tra R&S, organizzazione e produttività …

Measures Of Science & Technology In Ecuador, Phd(C) José Luis Massón Guerra

José Luis Massón Guerra, PhD(c)

One of the structural problems in Latin-American has been the lower innovative capacity and lower generation of economically exploitable knowledge. This phenomenon has been produced by the absence of government’s incentives and strategies in order to be competitive inside the Knowledge Based Economy. More concretely, political, institutional and social factors have contributed negatively within this reality. As a consequence, the knowledge generation in this region is insufficient not only to satisfy its necessities but also to be competitive in the global context. At difference, the developing regions have recognized the significance impact of Science and Technology (S&T) and Education in …

The (In)Essentiality Of Monopoly Power In Network Neutrality Violations, Matthias Bärwolff

Matthias Bärwolff

It has recently been proposed that competition in the provision of internet access does not obtain the normative goals of network neutrality proponents. Even under competition internet access providers will still have substantial incentives to discriminate against independent providers' content and applications.

We argue that this argument effectively conforms to basic insights from models of monopolistic competition and, in itself, holds little of the policy relevance alleged by network neutrality advocates. Without empirical validation the conclusions of such an argument-an urgent call for material network neutrality regulation-is unjustified.

Further, we point to the duality of the discrimination problem, for the …

Start-Up Commercialisation Strategy And Innovative Dynamics, Joshua S. Gans

Joshua S Gans

This paper endogenises a start-up’s choice between competitive and cooperative commercialisation in a dynamic environment. It is demonstrated that, depending upon firms’ dynamic capabilities, there may or may not be gains to trade between incumbents and start-ups in a cumulative innovation environment; that is, start-ups may not be adequately compensated for losses in future innovative potential. Because of this, there is no clear relationship between observed inter-industry innovation and commercialisation choice unless dynamic capabilities of firms are taken into account. In addition, the analysis demonstrates subtle and novel insights into the relationship between dynamic capabilities and rates of innovation.

Development Through Positive Deviance And Its Implications For Economic Policy Making And Public Administration In Africa: The Case Of Kenyan Agricultural Development, 1930–2005, Cosmas Milton Obote Ochieng Ochieng

Cosmas Milton Obote Ochieng Ochieng

Positive internal innovation has long been a central element of African agricultural development, even if modern efforts to stimulate technical, institutional, and policy innovations in African agriculture have tended to look outwards. This paper examines the role of positive deviance in Kenyan agriculture over the last 75 years to cast doubt on the alleged authoritative sources of policy advice and mandates from the outside. Positive deviance and appreciative inquiry are suggested as organizing frameworks for identifying and amplifying the generation and uptake of internal African innovations.

Intellectual Property And Marketing, Darius Noshir Lakdawalla, Tomas J. Philipson, Y. Richard Wang

Darius N. Lakdawalla

Patent protection spurs innovation by raising the rewards for research, but it usually results in less desirable allocations after the innovation has been discovered. In effect, patents reward inventors with inefficient monopoly power. However, previous analysis of intellectual property has focused only on the costs patents impose by restricting price-competition. We analyze the potentially important but overlooked role played by competition on dimensions other than price. Compared to a patent monopoly, competitive firms may engage in inefficient levels of non-price competition-such as marketing-when these activities confer benefits on competitors. Patent monopolies may thus price less efficiently, but market more efficiently …

Is There Skill-Biased Technological Change In Italian Manufacturing? Evidence From Firm-Level Data, Massimiliano Bratti, Nicola Matteucci

Nicola Matteucci

The bulk of the literature on the Skill-Biased Technological Change (SBTC) hypothesis has focused on the US and the UK, while evidence on other countries is ‘mixed’. We use firm-level data to test for the presence of SBTC in Italian manufacturing. The interest stems from the fact that Italy is a “late comer” country, suffers a gap in new technologies and has a ‘rigid’ labour market. We estimate employment-share equations using as a skill-ratio two alternative measures, the ratio between white collars and blue collars (WC/BC) and that between graduates and non-graduates (G/NG). We find an unconventional evidence supporting SBTC. …