The Modularity of Intellectual Property

对经济学和管理学学者来说，一个中心问题是创新者如何利用他们的创新创造的价值。申请人最近对专利和软件的许可做法进行的探索性研究表明，知识产权有一个模块结构。看来，适当的"知识产权模块化"是通过许可实现最佳价值分配的先决条件，也是防止无意中侵犯专利的经济影响的保障。知识产权模块化允许从知识产权的角度以最佳方式处理每个模块，从而改善技术市场并实现半开放式创新过程。来自哈佛商学院的Carliss Baldwin和Karim Lakhani和我计划通过概念和模型理论分析来解决这个问题，并辅以案例研究。我们将首先使用行业访谈来确定从业者是否以及如何“IP模块化”他们的工件，他们在这样做时面临什么问题和障碍，以及他们获得了什么好处。这些问题既适用于受专利保护的人工制品（有形人工制品，软件），也适用于受版权保护的人工制品（软件）。在软件领域，与不同许可证（开放源码和专有许可证）有关的"知识产权模块化"似乎特别重要。对工件的分析，特别是软件代码库，将使我们能够识别基于IP的模块化的好例子和坏例子。基于知识产权的模块化的扩展数学模型是对经验方法的补充。众所周知，模块化具有技术和组织维度。通过我们的研究，我们的目标是扩展模块化理论，包括"基于知识产权的模块化"，将其与技术市场的经济分析联系起来，并为管理者提供建议。

A central question both to economics and to management scholars is how innovators can appropriate the value their innovation creates. Recent exploratory research by the applicant on licensing practices of patents and software showed that there is a modular structure to intellectual property (IP). It appears that a suitable “IP modularization” is a precondition for optimal value appropriation by licensing, and a safeguard against the economic effects of inadvertent patent infringement. IP modularization allows treating each module in an optimal way from an IP perspective, thus improving markets for technology and enabling semi-open innovation processes.Profs. Carliss Baldwin and Karim Lakhani from Harvard Business School and I plan to address this issue by a conceptual and model-theoretical analysis, supported by case studies. We will first use industry interviews to determine if and how practitioners “IP modularize” their artifacts, what problems and obstacles they face in doing so, and what benefits they reap. These questions apply both to artifacts protected by patents (tangible artifacts, software), and artifacts protected by copyright (software). In the field of software, “IP modularization” with respect to different licenses (open source and proprietary licenses) seems to be of particular importance. An analysis of artifacts, in particular software code bases, will then allow us to identify good and bad examples of IP-based modularization. An extended mathematical model of IP-based modularization complements the empirical approaches.Modularity is known to have a technical and an organizational dimension to it. With our research, we aim to extend the theory of modularity to comprise “IP-based modularity,” link it to the economic analysis of markets for technology, and to generate advice for managers.