In our latest working paper, Francis Bloch and myself analyze the optimal protection strategy for an innovator of a complex innovation who faces the risk of imitation by a competitor. Complex innovations A “complex innovation” is an innovation that can be fragmented into a set of sub-innovations. Although the possibility exists to patent each sub-innovation, innovators […]
Tag Archives | IP management
IP Management
By 16 November 2011 13
In their book ‘Information Rules‘ (1999), Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian write the following: “The important thing is to maximise the value of your intellectual property, not to protect it for the sake of protection.“ I would like you to express your views about this sentence, based on two articles that Alain Strowel and myself have […]
Bayer’s aspirin: a lasting success without patent and strong trademark protection
By 28 October 2011 0
‘The serial painkiller’: this is how the Financial Times (27 oct. 2011, see here) describes the history of aspirin, the well-known medicine invented more than a century ago, when Bayer’s chemist Felix Hoffmann synthetized a stable form of its active ingredient. Aspirin is undissociable from Bayer, but the benefits of its active ingredient were apparently […]
LEGO: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?
By 13 October 2011 5
Regarding intellectual property management, LEGO may seem to suffer from some form of personality disorder. Over the years, the company has indeed been oscillating between very open and very closed attitudes. On the “open side”, LEGO appears nowadays as a champion of crowd-sourcing and of user-based innovation. LEGO’s recent Cuusoo project is a nice example of crowd-sourcing design, whereby the […]