Читать книгу Innovation Economics, Engineering and Management Handbook 1 - Группа авторов - Страница 29

While in the previous subsections more emphasis has been placed on the social and societal dimensions of the issue of appropriation of innovation, it should be recalled that this phenomenon also refers to the capture of the economic value of innovation. Indeed, organizations innovate to generate a difference from their competitors; they seek to increase the number of customers, revenues and economic results. This is how intellectual property comes into play in the subject at hand.

From a legal standpoint, there are several ownership regimes that should not be confused (Binctin 2018). Literary and artistic property (copyright, neighboring rights) exists because of the birth of creation, while industrial property (patents, trademarks and designs) requires formalism. For example, the patent is filed with a recognized institution, such as the INPI in France, the European Patent Office in Europe or the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The function of these regimes is to protect actors who have invested different resources (financial, material, etc.) in the development of innovation. From this perspective, organizations today no longer focus on a single regime, but combine them (Granstrand 1999; Reitzig 2004). Thus, the ability to combine intellectual property rights becomes an issue for them, whether large or small (Le Bas and Szostak 2016). When opportunities arise without the legislator having been able to regulate the terms, organizations exploit contract laws. This is notably the case to circumscribe the intellectual property rights of different contributors who have committed themselves to a collective project for the development of an innovation.

While these appropriation modalities primarily aim at the full capture of economic value, other modalities develop the idea that property rights are not a monolithic whole, but a bundle of rights. According to Schlager and Ostrom (1992), there is the right of access, the right to harvest, the right of management, the right to exclude and the right to alienate. This is the current of “creative commons”, which is similar to the culture of the “free” (Broca and Coriat 2015). Thus, the different rights may be held by different actors, which leads innovation management, to consider the question of appropriating the value of innovation from a different, but complementary, angle. Indeed, free movement does not question intellectual property, since it uses its foundations (Binctin 2015). On the contrary, it poses new challenges for organizations, and also for the regulator, notably on the question of the distribution of rights between actors and on the rules to be retained in this perspective. It could encourage better recognition of the contributions of employees, among others.

In conclusion, the appropriation of innovation remains a subject to be questioned because of the evolution of society from the point of view of the consumer, who is now more creative and has more power over the organization, of the members of the organization whose status is more protean than before, and also of the question of the ownership of this innovation.