Intellectual Property tools, standards and market positioning

Isabelle Liotard, Assistant Professor, University of Paris Nord, Centre d'Economie de Paris Nord (CEPN)

1/02/2008
(Original Publish Date: 3/1/2006)

To an economist observing corporate strategy during this age of the emergence and development of internet and the digital economy, one thing is clear: the move towards a New Economy has heightened both the use and the strategic exploitation of intellectual property by economic players. The very particular field of research constituted by intellectual property, which draws on the scientific disciplines of economics and law as well as the field of management, has already been studied for several decades. It continues to arouse widespread curiosity now, because of the scale of the current phenomenon. Although intellectual property and its subset, industrial property, have been in existence for a very long time (the origins of patents can be traced back to the Parte Venezzia of fifteenth century Italy), it is only over the last twenty years that its scope and use have grown on such a massive, unprecedented scale, accompanied by an equally dramatic rise in the difficulties it provokes. During the twentieth century, the protection of inventions by patent has regularly accompanied every new phase in technological innovation2 (Kline and Rivette, 2000). And this trend has continued recently during the explosion of internet and the digital economy, with software programmes, for example, which play an indispensable role in this domain, themselves becoming the object of patent protection.