Privacy and Public Goods in Innovation
Privacy and Public Goods in Innovation Shaun Hendy @hendysh Te Pūnaha Matatini - ‘the meeting place of many faces’ Auckland London Does it matter? Wellington City Library Complex Questions Health precinct Innovation precinct Complex Data Applicant(s) Invention Inventor(s) Creating Knowledge PATENTS AS A MEASURE OF INNOVATION • How does society fund the creation of new knowledge? James Watt (17361819) "Watt steam pumping engine" by Robert H. Thurston Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) Public Goods • Rival goods are used up when they are used by a consumer • Excludable goods can be restricted to only one consumer Rival Non-rival Excludable Private goods e.g. food Club goods e.g. cinema Non-excludable Common goods e.g. fish stocks Public goods e.g. lighthouses The Economics of Ideas Knowledge is non-rival • we can all possess the same knowledge and only partially excludable • difficult to keep it from spreading But knowledge costs money to create! Knowledge spillovers have a value to the economy that is as least as great as private benefits "Aveiro March 2012-13" by Alvesgaspar – Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons Intervention Logic: Patents A patent grants a monopoly to the owner for use of an invention for a limited period of time • Raises the market price of an invention closer to its value to society • Requires disclosure of the invention and the identity of the inventors Intervention Logic: Patents • The opportunity for a temporary monopoly is an incentive for investment in research and development • The disclosure of the invention means that others can build on the invention "Watt steam pumping engine" by Robert H. Thurston Public Benefits of Disclosure • As a publicly available record of the invention process, patents have allowed researchers to advance our understanding of innovation • e.g. The measurement of magnitude and geographic spread of knowledge spillovers (Jaffe 1987, 1993) • Many of R&D policies used by governments today draw on the knowledge generated from patent data Economic Geography of Innovation • Bigger cities produce more patents per capita • Inventors in bigger cities have denser collaboration networks • Patents from bigger cities are more diverse technologically • On average, patents in bigger cities are more novel Catriona Sissons (PhD) 1975-77 Japanese companies Hitachi EPO Patents (1975-2010) EPO (1975-2010) 1984-86 Japan France USA Germany 1990-92 Japan France USA Germany 1996-98 Japan France USA Germany 2002-04 Japan France USA Germany South Korea 2008-10 Japan France USA Germany South Korea China China These companies now produce 70% of the world’s patents Innovation Policies Innovation Policies • The government directly funds private R&D in New Zealand based firms (~ 9% of private R&D) • The effectiveness of this public investment is poorly understood • There has been little effort to collect or share the relevant data Evaluation of Innovation Policies • Records of projects that were funded are available • No counterfactual information retained (i.e. what did we not to fund) • No records of expert panel assessments Evaluation of Innovation Policies • Information about applicants not solicited, citing privacy act • Evaluation not considered as a lawful purpose of MBIE? Evaluation of Innovation Policies • Royal Society of New Zealand • Collects information about applicants • Retains counterfactual information • Retains records of decision making processes • Collects information on gender! Adam Jaffe Summary • Public availability of patent data has been a huge boon to our understanding of innovation and innovation policies • There are huge gaps in other types of data held by government regarding its innovation investments • Need to begin collecting, retaining and facilitating access to data that would allow design and evaluation of innovation policies
© Copyright 2024