Innovation and Imitation at Various Stages of Development

Essential oil Composition and Antioxidant Activity of Levisticum officinale Koch. at Various Phenological Stages

Background: The leaves, roots and seeds of Lovage (Levisticum officinale Koch) being used as an herb, vegetable and spice. Objective: The aim of this study is evaluation of the changes of phytochemical compound in aerial parts of the Lovage plants at different developmental stages as well as antioxidant activity. Methods: The plants were harvested from Hezar Mountain. After drying, essent...

Innovation, Imitation and Open Source

An extensive empirical literature indicates that, even without formal intellectual property rights, innovators enjoy a variety of first-mover advantages and that ‘imitation’ is itself a costly activity. There is also accumulating evidence that an ‘open’ approach to knowledge production can deliver substantial efficiency advantages. This paper introduces a formal framework incorporating all of t...

Sequential innovation, patents, and imitation

We argue that when innovation is “sequential” (so that each successive invention builds in an essential way on its predecessors) and “complementary” (so that each potential innovator takes a different research line), patent protection is not as useful for encouraging innovation as in a static setting. Indeed, society and even inventors themselves may be better off without such protection. Furth...

Innovation, Imitation, and Market Structure

How do market structure and the characteristics of goods affect the incentives to create new goods (to innovate) and to copy them (to imitate).In this paper we consider an economy in which goods differ according to their production technology, which determines the market structure, and according to the fraction of R&D (think knowledge or information) that it takes to create them. After innovati...

Innovation by Imitation?