The United States over the past two decades has seen an explosion of patent awards across a wide variety of technologies, and a dramatic increase in the volume of patent litigation between rivals. Numerous commentators have suggested that the proliferation of these awards, known as "patent thickets", has had socially detrimental consequences since overlapping intellectual property rights may make it difficult for inventors to commercialize new innovations. Patent pools, which can be defined as formal or informal organizations where for-profit firms share patent rights with each other and third parties, have been proposed as a way in which firms can address these "patent thicket" problems. Patent pools have been most plentiful and well established for decades in the information technology and communications industries. In the past few years, the biomedical research community has expressed increasing interest in patent pools as a potential solution for increasingly prevalent patent licensing issues in biotechnology-related fields. This project builds on the existing work on patent pools, trying to understand how the issues faced in the biomedical industries are similar and different to the issues in information technology and communication. The project combines empirical and theoretical research in this endeavor in an academically rigorous manner. The project is deepening our understanding of a crucial "knowledge-sharing organization", an institution, like a standard-setting organizations or open source project, where firms can strategically share knowledge.
BROADER IMPACTS For scientists and others interested in innovation policy, this project advances understanding of how patent thicket problems can be addressed, and the strategies that are most likely to be effective (as well as more problematic approaches). The project leaders are ensuring that the findings of the study are diffused in a variety of outreach efforts, in order to insure that the ideas can have the most impact. This takes several forms. First, the project leaders are involving practitioners as well as life scientists in the academic conference that is being organized on this topic. As in earlier projects, the project leaders are participating in the public policy process, explaining their findings. Finally, the project leaders are disseminating the ideas more broadly through outreach to the popular press.
