| 1. |
- Larsson, Stefan
(författare)
-
Between Daring and Deliberating : 3G as a Sustainability Issue in Swedish Spatial Planning
- 2008
-
Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis shows how different aspects of sustainable development have been handled or not handled in the third generation infrastructure development in Sweden. The difference between the design of the 3G development – emphazising competition, growth and regional access, based on a strong technological optimism - and the implementation, as the roll out struck the landscape, including the non-handled radiation issue and the legal changes in order to facilitate the roll out, is discussed and analyzed. The roll out formally started in late 2000 as the licence allocation process, the so called beauty contest, was finished. Four operators were to build partly competing systems within three years, each covering 8 860 000 persons, more than 99,98 percent of the populated areas. The Post and Telecommunications Agency can sanction operators not fulfilling licence conditions by a considerable fine. The coverage by the end of the period was between 66 and 74 percent of the promised 8 860 000, with only three remaining operators still participating. Not until 1 December 2006 did the first operator report the required coverage, followed by the two remaining operators by 1 June 2007. The municipal permit handling was blamed for the delay, a reason that “could not have been foreseen”, which helped the operators avoid sanctions from the PTA. The thesis shows that a slow municipal permit process can not explain the lack of coverage in some areas of Sweden. Environmental aspects were not handled at national level but assessed locally in the building permit handling, as well as the regional 12:6 consultations at the County Administrations. This is why the municipal permit process holds many of the keys regarding environmental management and planning. Therefore the permit processes regarding 3G masts has been charted as they developed in time and screened for main issues and conflicts. Public participation can be found in the local context tied to the legal concept of being a concerned party in the permit process, or the 12:6 consultation. In spite of this, the much debated radiation issue is lifted from the participative aspects and legally defined as not relevant. The theoretical basis of the analysis combines spatial planning and sociology of law, applying the sociological concept of norms as entities controlling action on the discussion of two different paradigms of governance derived from planning theory. The thesis project has been a part of a study within the MiSt programme, an interdisciplinary research programme on tools for environmental assessment in strategic decision making funded by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. Supervisors: professor Lars Emmelin, School of Planning, Blekinge Institute of Technology Karsten Åström, professor in sociology of law, Lund University
|
|
| 2. |
- Ewing, Thomas, 1958
(författare)
-
Indirect Exploitation of Intellectual Property Rights By Corporations and Investors: IP Privateering & Modern Letters of Marque & Reprisal
- 2011
-
Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Competitive pressures and rent-seeking behaviors have motivated companies and investors to develop indirect techniques for beneficially exploiting third-party intellectual property rights (IPRs) that qualitatively depart from the slate of direct exploitation tools whose usage has been honed during the past 30 years of the pro-patent era. Companies have increasingly realized that they do not need to create IPRs themselves to exploit them beneficially, which has been the conventional usage pattern. Among other things, because of a growing IPR market, companies can exploit IPRs beyond those arising from their own research and development (R&D) activities; they can simply purchase IPRs previously obtained by others. Similarly, a company defending itself in an IPR litigation may bring counterclaims against the plaintiff using not only its own IPRs but also market-acquired IPRs. These third-party purchases can be very helpful when the company holds no pertinent IPRs of its own. In a further development to this indirection trend, which is the subject of this thesis, companies have further realized that not only do they not need to create IPRs in order to exploit them beneficially, companies have also realized that they do not even need to own IPRs in order to consequently benefit from their exploitation by others. This phenomenon is labeled here as “IP privateering” because of its similarities to a method of waging war on the high seas that was banned by international treaty some 150 years ago.This thesis comprises a descriptive portion followed by a normative portion. After recounting the increasing IPR competition and rent seeking of the past 30 years, the descriptive portion identifies IP privateering as a strategy among the set of IPR litigations and licensing assertions. This behavior is classified as a specie of aggressive non-practicing entities (NPEs), with the distinction being that an aggressive NPE has no sponsor and is solely motivated by maximizing revenue from IPR assertions while an IP privateer has a sponsor who seeks consequential benefits from IPR assertions against specific target companies. The parameters of this newly identified strategy are probed using a variety of methods. Because of the sponsor’s needs to keep this strategy secret, the strategy has likely spread slowly among a small set of operating companies. The apparent evolution of this indirect IPR exploitation strategy is traced among these companies. Techniques for uncovering hidden information about NPEs are discussed and employed as tools for locating IP privateering cases among the aggressive NPEs. The limitations of this method for discovering sponsors are discussed. Electronic detection of indirect IPR exploitation is also discussed along with some highly granular results. Possibilities for future methodological developments are discussed, and it is also noted that specific government agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice (DOJ), have at their disposal tools that are not available to the academic community that could be used to gauge the breadth and depth of IP privateering, especially among the population of investors, and for curtailing the behavior where it is clearly illegal. A typology for IP privateering is provided that identifies the key variables associated with this strategy. Examples of privateering, both actual and hypothetical are also discussed. The identified privateering scenarios, while small in number, have amounted to well over $3 billion USD in rent collections and have possibly saved sponsoring companies an order of magnitude more in avoided revenue losses. Limitations on the strategy are explored by examining the negative consequences that could arise for the privateering sponsor. The risk of losing business reputation is discussed along with the various counterclaims that a target might potentially bring against a sponsor discovered in litigation. Corporate formalisms and lack of public disclosure regarding corporate ownership and control are discussed as tools that may prohibit targets from even being aware of IP privateering so that they could formulate counterclaims. The descriptive section discusses the infrastructure that supports privateering and concludes with a discussion of how a possible patent oversupply may facilitate this strategy. The normative portion observes that existing law may possibly be used to curtail anticompetitive and market manipulative privateering but further observes that effective curtailment may require the intervention of the SEC as well as the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, as private actors may be unable to defend themselves adequately. A review of those forms of privateering that are not clearly anticompetitive or market manipulative concludes that they will likely continue in the short-to-medium term and may require the intervention of the legislator if their curtailment is desired. The social utility of these legal forms of privateering is examined from various points of view including corporate, SME, investor, and inventor. Further questions are posed regarding IP privateering and aggressive NPEs (observing that both actors are likely supported financially by participants operating in the investment capital market), the need for ownership transparency in the innovation system, and whether the legislator should more explicitly design an innovation system that includes boundaries for various IPR strategies. The thesis concludes with an outline for further analysis and the additional tools that may need to be developed to support further studies.
|
|
| 3. |
- Holgersson, Marcus, 1983
(författare)
-
Intellectual Property Strategies and Innovation: Causes and Consequences for Firms and Nations
- 2011
-
Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- New and useful ideas and knowledge, commonly denoted innovations after coming into use, are of decisive importance for economic growth and welfare. To promote the generation and diffusion of innovations, most, if not all, industrialized and industrializing societies rely on some form of an intellectual property rights (IPRs) system. As technological diversification, technological convergence, and open innovation become increasingly important, proper management of and strategies for IPRs and intellectual property (IP) becomes ever more central for the competitiveness of firms and nations. The general purpose of this thesis it to explore and explain the causes and consequences of IP strategies and policies at firm, national, and international levels in different industrial contexts with different types and degrees of openness in innovation. With focus on technological innovations and technology-related IP, various methods are employed to fulfill the purpose. The results show that, due to IP policy developments at national and international level, large firms have increasingly developed various IP strategies, especially patent strategies, to appropriate returns from innovations. As an example, large firms were found to in a first step increase their patenting (in terms of quantity), and in a second step focus more on selective and quality-oriented patenting in which the IP-related work is also internationalized. This internationalization of IP heavily impacts the patent offices and IP policies, especially in small countries where the national patenting tend to decrease as a result. Small firms on the other hand cannot gain the same benefits as large firms from an IPR system, especially from the patent system as currently designed, since they do not have enough resources for monitoring and enforcing their rights, which in turn limits the protective function of patents. Instead, small firms use patents to attract customers and investors. Patents then provide a governance mechanism for early stage financing of innovations. A new measure based on statistics at the national level indicates that the preferred markets for patenting from firms and inventors in various countries become increasingly similar. In addition, there is a convergence of national legal IPR systems around the world. Developing and industrializing nations in this convergence process typically switch from a weak to a strong IP regime in their national innovation systems, at a point in time when the mainly innovative benefits of a strong regime outweigh the mainly imitative benefits of a weak regime for the nation and its firms. A similar switch from a weak to a strong IP regime can be seen in various innovation systems, e.g. in mobile telecommunications. The openness of innovation in such a corporate innovation system is closely related to the IP strategies of the involved firms, and the results show that the openness in a system is directly and strongly affected by changes in the IP strategies of its firms.The thesis shows the importance of the interaction between IP strategies of large and small firms, between different large and small nations’ IP policies, and between IP strategies of firms and IP policies of nations. Such interactions are essential to consider for future research, as are the roles of IPRs and IP management in innovation systems with various degrees of openness.
|
|
| 4. |
- Stefan, Ioana
(författare)
-
Exploring Tensions between Appropriability and Openness to Collaboration in Innovation
- 2017
-
Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Researchers, policy makers and practitioners alike have in recent years acknowledged a growing tendency towards opening up the innovation process by combining internal organizational assets with external actors’ resources. However, opening up the innovation process usually also entails revealing ideas, which may result in misappropriation. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate tensions related to the openness-appropriability relationship; this is done in three studies. The first study concerns a specific contextual factor that is likely to stress the openness-appropriability tensions: the location of external partners in innovation. The second study relates to the way managing openness-appropriability tensions affects performance, and the third study involves a theoretical discussion about the nature of the tensions occurring in the openness-appropriability relationship, i.e. paradoxical, dilemmatic, or dialectical. The first two studies apply quantitative methods, using survey data, while the third is a conceptual paper. The findings from the first study indicate that the use of different groups of appropriability mechanisms varies across various types of openness and that the location of external partners in innovation refines these linkages even more. The second study’s main takeaway is that the higher appropriability intensity, i.e. the extent to which appropriability mechanisms are put into practice, explains higher performance outcomes. The third study suggests that the tensions between openness and appropriability are more likely of paradoxical nature. From a theoretical perspective, findings indicate that paradoxical tensions between openness and appropriability may have a spatial dimension, and that these tensions should also be investigated in regards to performance. Managerial implications point out that opening up to innovation partners located abroad is likely to require more costly appropriability mechanisms.
|
|
