Intellectual Property, Competition, and Science versus Technology

Abstract

This paper models pre-invention-insight research effort and explores the proposition that competition among potential inventors, who can freely enter into the discovery process and who freely share their ideas without taking intellectual property as they strive to discover invention insights, increases research effort above what would occur without the free sharing of ideas, hence stimulating invention and ultimately innovation. Given an idealized dichotomy between pre-invention-insight research and investment in research and development (R&D), the proposition is shown to be true. Although it is also shown that the proposition is not necessarily true given realistic overlapping of R&D investment with the search for invention insight, historical evidence suggests that the idealized dichotomy may be a sufficiently accurate description to allow the proposition to provide good guidance for public policy toward intellectual property in scientific findings.

Keywords: intellectual property (IP), invention, innovation, patents, public funding, research and development (R&D), research subsidies, science, technology

JEL Classification: O31, O32, O34, O38