The Impact and Effectiveness of Support Measures for Exploiting Intellectual Property

John Rigby, Ronnie Ramlogan

Nesta Working Paper 12/03
Issued: January 2012
JEL Classification: O31, O32, O34, O38
Keywords: IPR, Codified knowledge; policy

Abstract

This paper is part of the Compendium of Evidence on the Effectiveness of Innovation Policy Intervention. It examines the evidence on the policies which have been employed to support users and would be users of the intellectual property system and which can be described as policy or programme support measures. The focus of the review is not therefore upon the IPR system itself, or its detailed development over time. Rather, the focus is upon those policies that seek to help inventors and other commercial actors become aware of the IP system, and explicitly to help them know how they might use it. The review is in five main sections, a short introduction, a conceptual background to orient the reader, a description of the scope of the review, a description of the main findings from the review, and then conclusions are presented. The findings fall into two main sections to cover two fundamentally different forms of support, on the one hand a) programmes and initiatives focused upon public sector organisations, including universities which are often responsible for the development of their own strategies, information and awareness schemes for their own staff and b) government initiatives directed at private sector organisations, principally firms but also at inventors.  In each section we have considered the details of the schemes, the assumptions that they make their mode of operation, their targets and look at the validity and appropriateness of their models, and the evidence of their effectiveness and efficiency.

Download Working Paper