Suchergebnisse

Intellectual property rights, including patents, structure innovation and allocate the benefits and costs of innovation. The article describes four deficiencies in understanding these rights regarding biotechnology patents. The authors contend that: 1) different disciplines possess assumptions about the working of patents that are based neither in fact nor in theory, 2) the fragmented approach to analyzing intellectual property rights leads to research results that can be misleading, and 3) the national and international property policy is often formed based on these incomplete or misleading research results. To address these deficiencies, the authors are currently developing a transdisciplinary approach to intellectual property rights, which uses a set of seven transdisciplinary and evaluative probes based on the results of research conducted to date, outlined here. The article also describes how this approach provides a more comprehensive analysis of patent systems to help academics and policy-makers examine the operation of patent systems in their social contexts.