Innovation Dynamics, Patents, and Dynamic-Elasticity Tests for the Promotion of Progress
2010; The MIT Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0897-3393
Autores Tópico(s)Firm Innovation and Growth
ResumoTable of Contents I. Introduction II. A Model for Innovation Dynamics A. Threshold Concerns in Constructing a Model for Innovation Dynamics B. The Basic Model and Its Explanation III. Operation of the Model A. Small-v Dynamics 1. Terminal Velocity for Negligibly-Variable Positive Feedback 2. Exponential Growth for Nonnegligible Linear Positive Feedback 3. Power-Law Growth for Large Sublinear Positive Feedback B. Large-v Dynamics 1. Terminal Velocity for Negligibly-Variable Positive Feedback 2. Power-Law Growth for Large Linear or Sublinear Positive Feedback IV. Analysis of Theoretical Results A. Different Regimes, Temporal and Technological, for Innovative B. Predictions of Time-Dependent Behavior Compared to Patent Counts C. Dynamic-Elasticity Tests for Questions of Innovation Policy V. Conclusion VI. Appendix I. Introduction Much recent debate over patents has focused on their ability to act as brakes as well as stimulants to innovation. Theoretical studies have described how patents can impede innovation, whether by generating an anticommons (1) or by otherwise taxing, complicating, or outright blocking the efforts of later developers. (2) In books with such foreboding titles as Patent Failure (3) and Innovation and Its Discontents, (4) commentators have argued that these undesirable theoretical capacities are being realized and that patents, government grants meant to stimulate technological progress, might be instead doing much to hold it back. (5) The recognized tension between patents' capacities to stimulate and to slow technological progress highlights an important point. Whether patents serve their constitutionally specified role of promoting] ... Progress (6) depends significantly on the dynamics through which that progress occurs. For any given field of technology, these dynamics determine whether patents' innovation-stimulating effects outweigh their innovation-impeding effects. Moreover, the trajectory of technological progress that these dynamics generate can have significant implications for patent policy. (7) Papers by Polk Wagner and Dennis Karjala suggest that, if the growth of technological information is fundamentally exponential in time, the extent to which patents impede patentable technologies' use and availability might be less of a concern than if the growth of technological information is essentially linear. (8) More generally, commentators commonly assume one or another form for natural patent dynamics when they suggest that the significant growth in the number of patent applications and issued patents over the last few decades indicates a fundamental problem, rather than plausibly reflecting such presumed social goods as increased technological progress or increased success in the patent system's promotion of technological disclosure as an alternative to secrecy. (9) But any assumptions that we know the natural form of technological progress in one or another field, or as a whole, seem premature. Like the understanding of entrepreneurial dynamics, (10) the understanding of innovation dynamics appears to be in its infancy. Indeed, infancy is perhaps too generous a term. Understanding of innovation dynamics might be better characterized as embryonic. Prior theoretical work has often focused on how patents or other incentives or impediments to innovation might affect discrete decisions about whether, and with what level of resource commitment, to pursue a particular line of research. (11) Although such decision models can be instructive, their isolated-decision-point structure tends to result in their neither suggesting a particular trajectory for progress nor directing empirical work in a way likely to lead to deeper understanding of innovation dynamics. This Article steps into the breach by presenting a fluid-mechanics-inspired model for innovation dynamics. …
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