World Intellectual Property Report 2011

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Chapter 1 the Changing faCe of innovation and intelleCtual property 1.2 The shifting nature of innovation While there is consensus on the importance of innovation, our understanding of innovative activity and the process of innovation itself continue to change. First, the way innovation is perceived and understood has evolved over the last two decades. Previously, economists and policymakers focused on R&D-based technological product innovation, largely produced in-house and mostly in manufacturing industries. This type of innovation is performed by a highly educated labor force in R&D-intensive companies with strong ties to leading centers of excellence in the scientific world. 26 The process leading to such innovation was conceptualized as closed, internal and localized. Technological breakthroughs were necessarily “radical” and took place at the “global knowledge frontier”, without allowing for the possibility of local variations or adaptations of existing technologies. This also implied the existence of leading and lagging countries – i.e., the “periphery” versus the “core” – with low- or middle-income economies naturally catching up to more advanced ones. According to this view, firms from poorer countries were passive adopters of foreign technologies. 26 See Fagerberg et al. (2010). 27 See David and Foray (2002). Today, innovation capability has been seen less in terms of the ability to discover new technological, state-ofthe-art inventions. The literature now emphasizes the ability to exploit new technological combinations, the notion of incremental innovation and “innovation without research”. 27 Furthermore, non-R&D-innovative expenditure, often part of later phases of development and testing, is an important and necessary component of reaping the rewards of technological innovation. Such non-technological innovation activity is often related to process, organizational, marketing, brand or design innovation, technical specifications, employee training, or logistics and distribution (see Figure 1.1, left column, and Subsection 1.2.4). There is also greater interest in understanding how innovation takes place in low- and middle-income countries, noting that incremental forms of innovation can impact on development. This evolution in thought also recognizes that existing notions of innovation are too focused on frontier technologies and original innovation. While innovation can take place at the global frontier, local innovation that is new to a firm or a country can be equally important (see Figure 1.1, right column). Second, the process of innovation has undergone sig- nificant change. As part of a new innovation paradigm, investment in innovation-related activity has consistently intensified at the firm, country and global level, both in terms of levels and shares of other investment, adding new innovation actors from outside high-income economies. This shift has also led to a much more complex structure of knowledge production activity, with innovative activity more dispersed geographically and collaboration on the rise, often in response to technological complexity. 27
Chapter 1 the Changing faCe of innovation and intelleCtual property Figure 1.1: Innovation takes different forms and has different geographical dimensions Types of Innovation Different forms of innovation Different geographical dimensions Some of the numerous drivers for this gradually shifting innovation landscape are well-known: • economies have become more knowledge-based as more countries enter the innovation-driven stage of development; • globalization has led to new markets for innovative products as well as new production locations for them – Asia being the prime example of both; • information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become diffused across industries and countries and have led to a fall in the cost of codifying, managing and sharing data and knowledge; • the falling cost of travel has encouraged greater mobility; and • the rise of common technology standards and platforms tied to de facto or industry standards – creating new innovation ecosystems on the one hand, and technological convergence on the other hand – has increased the ability to fragment innovation processes as well as the complexity of innovation. 28 Product innovation (often but not necessarily R&D-based) Process innovation enhancing efficiency/productivity Organizational innovation enhancing product and process Marketing innovation and brands for new and improved products Innovation at the global frontier – New to the world Local innovation – New to the firm or to the country The next subsections show that changes in the innovation landscape have happened more gradually and subtly over time than is often claimed. Trends that are often discussed, such as the increasing internationalization of innovation or wider “open” collaboration, are compared with official statistics, which time and again paint a more nuanced view. For instance, over the past two decades innovative activity has become more and more internationalized. Still, despite the shift in geographical composition of global science and technology production, R&D activity remains concentrated in only a few economies. 28 For reasons of data availability (see Box 1.2), the next sections focus on innovation measured by quantifying knowledge and R&D inputs. However, innovation and related processes vary widely depending on the industry sector in question (see Chapter 2). The development of new drugs in the pharmaceutical sector, for instance, involves other levels and types of R&D investment and innovation activity than is the case in other sectors. This sectoral heterogeneity has to be kept in mind when studying the various degrees of collaboration, globalization and the use of IP at the aggregate level. 28 See Tether and Tajar (2008) and UNESCO (2010).
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AcRonYms ASTP Association of Europe
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