Interfacing Open Innovation and Intellectual Property Law

Dr. Nari Lee, MIPLC
Prof. Soili Nystén Haarla, Universtiy of Eastern Finland

As the paradigm of innovation becomes more user oriented and collaborative, to benefit from this changing paradigm, firms need to adjust their intellectual property rights management strategy and devise tools to manage openness. Crucially, firms need to resolve how to interface the "closed innovation" paradigm required to acquire intellectual property rights in law and to introduce openness in the process of innovation and decentralised innovation process. While the topic of open innovation has produced numerous works especially in the area of business administration and organizational studies, literature on interfacing open innovation with intellectual property law is rare or rather focused on specific subject matters of IP. For example, legal research on open innovation focus on computer, open source software or user generated contents types. This leaves out vast areas of technology uncovered and under researched. Based on a collaborative empirical research project initiated in Finland, this research project identify private ordering tools that are required to manage openness, in response to legal context, and examine to what degree the protection of intellectual property, in particular patent, can be adapted or interfaced with open innovation paradigm. 

Keywords: Patent, Open Innovation, Intellectual Property Rights, Governance, Coordination, Private Ordering.

Read more about past activities and publications of this project.