Innovation, investment and patents
One of my long-term themes on this blog is knowledge work - how we measure the productivity or capital value of knowledge, and how it is converted into valuable outputs. And a recurring recent point has been investment, what it is and how we encourage it. Combining these two is a posting from VoxEU from a few months ago: " Efficiency in the 'market for innovation' " by Alberto Galasso and Mark Schankerman. They claim that "The 'market for innovation' - the licensing and sale of patents - is, for example, one of the principal incentives for firms to invest in R&D." My instinct is that this is not true at all. Lots of companies that I work with invest in R&D, and virtually none have any patents. Admittedly I do not work with any large biotech or electronics manufacturers, so my anecdotal evidence is not necessarily representative. But I do believe that a lot of innovation goes on in the marketplace which is not captured in patent statistics. Ec...