Innovation and Imitation in an Information Age

News at Work: Imitation in an Age of Information Abundance

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?