Organizing Creativity under Regulatory Uncertainty: Challenges of Intellectual Property

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Regulatory uncertainty related to intellectual property rights has become ubiquitous in creative and innovative processes. Conventional economic approaches assume that patents in area of technological innovation on the one hand and copyright in the area of creative activity on the other hand provide incentives for investments in creative processes by protecting their outputs and thereby rendering returns from future economic exploitation predictable. More recent research, however, shows that the expansion of intellectual property rights, the rise of digital technology and the introduction of novel forms of organization generate increasing uncertainty about the scope and effects of intellectual property regulation among those involved in creative processes. From an organizational theory perspective, such uncertainty arising for example in cumulative invention (patent law) or complex rights clearing (copyright) raises question about social practices and institutions which can stabilize mutual expectations. So far, however, the impact of regulatory uncertainty on the organization and outputs of creative processes have been rarely investigated from a business studies or sociological perspective. The aim of this interdisciplinary research project is to analyze from a process perspective how organizational actors perceive regulatory uncertainty arising from intellectual property rights, how they deal with this uncertainty in creative processes at the level of projects as well as in their interactions at the level of the organizational field and what are the overall implications for creativity. These questions will be addressed from the perspective of business studies and comparative economic sociology based on a combination of practice and institutional theories.Focusing empirically on specific subfields of the German music and pharma industries, the project is organized in three work packages (WP). First, we will analyze how different actor groups (e.g. artists, researchers, managers, legal professionals) perceive and address regulatory uncertainty through organizational and institutional practices at the level of organizational fields (WP1). In a second step, we will compare practices of dealing with uncertainty in the context of creative projects through analyzing artefact biographies (WP2). Building on these two work packages, we will integrate project and field dynamics with the aim of identifying social mechanisms for reducing and inducing regulatory uncertainty in creative processes in order to work towards a micro foundation for general theories about the interrelation between intellectual property rights and creativity (WP3). Results of the research project will be published in leading academic journals and as a monography with an international university press.