Organizational Perspectives on Intellectual-Property Reform

Abstract

This chapter presents a novel organizational perspective on “patent reform” in the U.S. Supreme Court, Congress, and the federal courts during 2006–2020. Debates between proponents of strong and weaker patents can be understood as a conflict between entities that rely on integrated business models for monetizing R&D, which deploy non-IP complementary assets to capture returns on innovation, and entities that rely on non-integrated business models, which monetize R&D through licensing and other IP-dependent contractual relationships. Weak-IP regimes induce an organizational bias that favors integrated and platform-based firms that capture returns on innovation within internal capital and information markets while impeding entry by smaller, R&D-specialized entities that capture returns on innovation through external capital and informational markets. By contrast, strong-IP regimes enable firms and other entities to select from the full range of more and less integrated structures for executing the innovation and commercialization process.