Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Patent, Shmatent

Very interesting paper on patents. (Yes, I was looking at Maskin's papers, after he won the Nobel in Economics).

Bottom line: Firms that do NOT patent their technologies innovate faster, and are actually more profitable.

Causal, or just correlation?

(Nod to BR, who knows stuff)

1 comment:

Shawn said...

seems like a patent would provide a buffer, an ability to sit on your ass and reap the benefits...while non-patent makes you hustle to use your technology as quickly and as effectively as possible to make that dolla.

apple patents the shit out of everything, it seems (or perhaps that's just because fanatics comb the patent filings for anything apple and paste it all over everywhere, as an effort toward figuring out the next cupertino-thing), but seems like some or even most of them are go-nowhere patents.