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The Economic Relevance of Intellectual Property and its Protection - a study focusing on the German "Mittelstand" (SMEs)
The Economic Relevance of Intellectual Property and its Protection - a study focusing on the German "Mittelstand" (SMEs)
[1]
- © Copyright??
[2]
- © BMWi
The key questions of this research can be
summarized in three blocks:
The initial purpose of the
study was to analyse the importance of intellectual property compared
to traditional tangible assets in the German economy and its relative
development over time. A growing relevance of intangible assets
increases the need to protect innovation using formal property rights
like patents and trademarks or informal, strategic methods like
technical copyright protection, trade secrecy or fast realization of
innovations (lead advantage). The analysis of German companies’ IPR
protection strategies was an integral part of the study.
A
further point for analysis in this study was the growing threat of
illegal imitation in emerging markets like China, but also in Germany
and in other industrialized countries. The range of counterfeiting
concerning proprietary technologies and design imitation as well as
the resulting damages were studied. This includes financial impacts as
well as employment losses and the distortion of strategic business
decisions.
A third goal was to evaluate a possible need for
further economic policy actions. It is reasonable to assume that
especially R&D-intensive SME are at disadvantage when it comes to
protecting innovation through the patent system and face challenges
exploiting their own IP efficiently. There are a number of activities
intending to facilitate the entrance of SMEs into the IP system. From
this study insights can be gained for support programs on the use of
IPR, effective IP enforcement and its economic exploitation of
innovation. Based on a detailed analysis of IP support programs, this
study was to provide recommendations for improvements and to point out
inefficiencies or loopholes in existing SME support programs.
A summary of the main results in English can be downloaded here [3],
the German version of the full report is available as
BMWi-Forschungsbericht Nr. 579 [4]
cs/bericht.GIF
rschung_laufende_Projekte/bericht.GIF
DF_Dateien/Publikationen/Kurzversion_Geistiges_Eigentum
_final_en2_01.pdf
/Dokumentationen/forschungsbericht-579,property=pdf,ber
eich=bmwi,sprache=de,rwb=true.pdf