Innovation Economics Approach to Intellectual Property Law Scholarship

Be it through theoretical modelling, empirical analysis, or qualitative investigations, innovation economics aims to better understand how policy-making could better stimulate technical change, innovation, and growth. Stimulating innovation is always part of the political agenda, as markets rarely reach the socially optimal level of innovation due to important ‘market failures’ associated with the innovation process. Governments thus revert to innovation economics to stimulate the creation of new knowledge and its diffusion, as well as to promote those innovative and creative processes beneficial for their economies. In fact, innovation economics provides policy tools to policy-makers that aim to foster technological change and innovation. This short chapter focuses on patent policies, as they are of major interest for intellectual property (IP) scholars. I first cover patent policy effectiveness, a key concept in innovation economics. I then analyse the main areas of inquiry of patent economics and indicate for each the main investigations that have been carried out and their implications.