Towards an Open Innovation Paradigm for Intellectual Property Rights.

A recent viewpoint in the IP space is the role of intellectual property as an enabling mechanism for innovation, as a means to promote the open exchange of innovation inputs. Only few authors have started to ask how licensing arrangements can promote the growth and efficiency of markets for technology and how IP needs to be subsequently managed to achieve these goals. Because this type of approach essentially incites a paradigm shift in how we think about IP, the literature building upon this work is to a large extent still concerned with the very simple question “how do you actually do that?” In this chapter, we build upon this second perspective, and connect it directly to open innovation, a particular type of innovation that has become more salient in recent years. We will discuss how IP can inhibit open innovation, or, if properly managed, can enhance its electiveness. We sketch out some illustrative examples to demonstrate our arguments, and make them more concrete for the reader.