Spill Your (Trade) Secrets: Knowledge Networks as Innovation Drivers

Spill Your (Trade) Secrets: Knowledge Networks as Innovation Drivers

Theories of intellectual property take the individual inventor or the firm as the unit of innovation. But studies in economic sociology show that in complex fields where knowledge is rapidly advancing and widely dispersed among different firms, the locus of innovation is neither an individual nor a single firm. Rather, innovative ideas originate in the informal networks of learning and collabor...

Trade Secrets: Tools for Innovation and Collaboration

Knowledge spill-overs, innovation and regional development

Law and Innovation: Evidence from the Uniform Trade Secrets Act

Most research and policy on protecting innovation focus on patents. Yet, almost all technology managers report secrecy to be more important than patents. Here, I show theoretically that stronger secrecy laws could increase or reduce R&D. By reducing spillovers, secrecy laws might reduce or raise the return to R&D, depending on whether spillover and own R&D are complements or substitutes. By str...

The Determination of Social Needs as Drivers of Social Innovation

Social innovation has been contextualized as a new way of resolving deeply entrenched development issues. The identification and resolution of social needs is said to be the driving force of social innovation. With features such as sustainability and scalability, social innovation has the potential to change the way we perceive and engage with development in the future. This research takes a cr...