ECON 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Intellectual Property, Non-Disclosure Agreement, Lead Time
Document Summary
Advantages: they encourage the creation of ip and pay for associated research and development, lead time, secrecy and tacitness of knowledge. Disadvantages: public interest is harmed by protectionist legislation. Collaborators want to safeguard their own ipr: negative effect on a strategy of long-term value creation, expensive and time consuming, only a limited level of ipr is desirable to encourage risk taking and innovation. Firms need to balance the desire to protect their knowledge with the need to share aspects of knowledge to promote innovation: secrecy may be just as strong a tool as ipr. Get employees or third parties to sign a confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement which prevents them from disclosing your idea. May be enough on its own to prevent others from trying to exploit the invention. It gives the right to take legal action to shop others from exploiting the invention and to claim damages.
