How Much Should Society Fuel the Greed of Innovators? On the Relations between Appropriability, Opportunities and Rates of Innovation

The paper attempts a critical assessment of both the theory and the empirical evidence on the role of appropriability and in particular of Intellectual Property Right (IPR) as incentives for technological innovation. We start with a critical discussion of the standard justification of the attribution of IPR in terms of "market failures" in knowledge generation. Such an approach we argue misses important features of technological knowledge and also neglects the importance of non-market institutions in the innovation process. Next, we examine the recent changes in the IPR regimes and their influence upon both rates of patenting and underlying rates of innovation. The evidence broadly suggests that, first, IPRs are not the most important device apt to "profit from innovation"; and second, they have at best no impact, or possibly even a negative impact on the underlying rates of innovation. Rather, we argued, technology- and industry-specific patterns of innovation are primarily driven by the opportunities associated with each technological paradigm. Conversely, firm-specific abilities to seize them and "profit from innovation" depend partly on adequacy of the strategic combinations identified by the taxonomy of Teece (1986) and partly on idiosyncratic capabilities embodied in the various firms.Appropriability, Intellectual Property Right, Innovation, Technological opportunities

The structure of problem-solving knowledge and the structure of organisations

This work presents a model of organisational problem solving able to account for the relationships between problem complexity, tasks decentralilzation and problem solving efficiency. Whenever problem solving requires the coordination of a multiplicity of interdependent elements, the varying degrees of decentralization of cognitive and operational tasks shape the solution which can be generated, tested and selected. Suboptimality and path-dependence are shown to be ubiquitous features of organisational problem solving. At the same time, the model allows a precise exploration of the possible trade-offs between decompostion patterns and search efficiency involved in different organisational architectures.-

Appropriability, Patents, and Rates of Innovation in Complex Products Industries

The economic theory of intellectual property rights is based on a rather narrow view of both competition and technological knowledge. We suggest some ways of enriching this framework with a more empirically grounded view of both and, by means of a simulation model, we analyze the impact of different property right regimes on the dynamics of a complex product industry, that is an industry where products are complex multi-component objects and competition takes place mainly through differentiation and component innovation. We show that, as the complexity of the product spaces increases, stronger patent regimes yield lower rates of innovation, lower product quality and lower consumers' welfare. localized ones.patents; appropriability of innovation; complex product industries; industrial dynamics

Cohomology rings of compactifications of toric arrangements

Some projective wonderful models for the complement of a toric arrangement in a n-dimensional algebraic torus T were constructed in [3]. In this paper we describe their integer cohomology rings by generators and relations.Comment: A new section (Section 9) has been added, to include the presentation of the cohomology rings of all the strata in the boundar

On the refurbishment of the public building stock toward the nearly zero-energy target: two Italian case studies

The study presents some results of the on-going European Project, RePublic_ZEB, on the refurbishment of the public building stock towards nearly Zero Energy Building (nZEB). The work is focused on the application of the nZEB requirements to two existing public buildings representative of the 1960s in Northern Italy. Many packages of energy efficiency measures that comply with nZEB requirements are identified and evaluated. The aim is to promote energy efficient but also cost-effective solutions for the Italian building stock refurbishment. The results are presented in terms of “package of measures”, energy consumption, global costs, actualized pay-back period and CO2 emission

A differential algebra and the homotopy type of the complement of a toric arrangement

We show that the rational homotopy type of the complement of a toric arrangement is completely determined by two sets of combinatorial data. This is obtained by introducing a differential graded algebra over Q whose minimal model is equivalent to the Sullivan minimal model of the arrangement

Projective wonderful models for toric arrangements

In this paper we illustrate an algorithmic procedure which allows to build projective wonderful models for the complement of a toric arrangement in a n-dimensional algebraic torus T. The main step of the construction, inspired by [9], is a combinatorial algorithm that produces a toric variety by subdividing in a suitable way a given smooth fan