Eric J. Iversen

A baseline for the impact of academic patenting legislation in Norway

As the commercialization of academic research has risen as a target area in many countries, the need for better empirical data collection to evaluate policy changes on this front has increasingly been recognized. This need is exemplified in the Norwegian case where legislative changes went into effect in 2003 expressly to encourage greater commercialization through patenting research results. This policy ambition faces the problem that no record of the patenting activity of academic researchers is available before 2003 when the country’s “professor’s privilege” was phased out. This article addresses the fundamental difficulty of how to empirically test the effect of such policy aims. It develops a methodology which can be used to reliably baseline changes in the extent and focus of academic patents. The purpose is to describe the empirical approach and results, while also providing insight into the changes in Norwegian policy on this front and their context.

Raising standards: innovation and the emerging global standardization environment for ICTs

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between technical standardization and innovation in the ICT sector. In many ways, this exercise involves revisiting the themes or sub-themes of much work already done in this growing area. In others, it involves linking the dominantly economics standards-oriented literature with systems-oriented innovation-studies and other cross-disciplinary approaches. Our objective here is to review some of this literature and, hopefully, provide a synthesis that advances our appreciation of standardizations role in the innovation process. This is an important exercise as a sure-footed understanding of the fundamental relationship allows one to appreciate the effects and implications of the standardization process within the changing environment, especially, implications for user-participation.

IPRs and Norwegian enterprises: diversification of innovative efforts in Norwegian firms

The key message of this book is that heterogeneity should be seen as an intrinsic and indispensable element of knowledge systems. The authors address the concept of heterogeneity in a multi-disciplinary fashion, including perspectives from evolutionary economics and innovation system studies, and relate this approach to existing theories in a broad range of fields.