Innovators, Firms, and Markets: The Organizational Logic of Intellectual Property [Hardcover]

Innovators, Firms, and Marketschallenges the prevailing policy consensus that robustly enforced intellectual property rights suppress competition and innovation by protecting incumbents from entry threats. Jonathan M. Barnett argues that IP rights enhance competition and innovation by enabling entry by idea-rich but capital-poor firms that may otherwise be blocked from the market. The book moves from theory to empirics through an economic history of the U.S. patent system and analysis of firms' lobbying tendencies on IP issues. Case studies of the biotechnology and semiconductor markets illustrate how patents enable entrepreneurs to play the disruptive function that is critical to successful innovation ecosystems.Conventional wisdom holds that robust enforcement of intellectual property (IP) right suppress competition and innovation by shielding incumbents against the entry threats posed by smaller innovators. That assumption has driven mostly successful efforts to weaken US patent protections for over a decade. This book challenges that assumption.InInnovators, Firms, and Markets, Jonathan M. Barnett confronts the reigning policy consensus by analyzing the relationship between IP rights, firm organization, and market structure. Integrating tools and concepts from IP and antitrust law, institutional economics, and political science, real-world understandings of technology markets, and empirical insights from the economic history of the US patent system, Barnett provides a novel framework for IP policy analysis. His cohesive framework explains how robust enforcement of IP rights enables entrepreneurial firms, which are rich in ideas but poor in capital, to secure outside investment and form the cooperative relationships needed to transform a breakthrough innovation into a marketable product. The history of the US patent system and firms' lobbying tendencies show that weakening patent protections removes a critical tool for entrants to challenge inculS·