Intellectual Property at the Boundary

Abstract

Significant creative work — both commercial and noncommercial — is organized neither by market transactions using legally defined intellectual property nor by top-down task management within firms, but by privately ordered governance regimes, such as user innovator communities. Some creative groups opt for such regimes even though IP protection is legally and practically available. This chapter argues that are general reasons to expect private ordering to be more effective than formal intellectual property at encouraging innovation in some situations. It then focuses on issues that arise when these alternative innovation regimes butt up against the intellectual property-based market. What occurs in these boundary zones is critical to the stability of the privately ordered innovation governance regimes, to the transfer of socially valuable innovations between creative groups and outsiders and to the potential for collaboration across these boundaries. Except in the case of university technology transfer, the boundaries between privately ordered innovation regimes and the intellectual property-based market have yet to receive much attention from researchers.

Keywords: patents, user innovation, intellectual property