Information and intellectual property: the global challenges

Looking back to the seminal papers by Richard R. Nelson, “The simple economics of basic scientific research,” and Kenneth Arrow, “Economic welfare and the allocation of resources for invention,” this article claims that in the last fifty years, there has been a paradigm change in our understanding of the economics of research and invention. The article argues that there are innovations within the process of innovation itself, and in particular in the instruments of promoting invention and innovation—the exclusive intellectual property rights granted to single economic actors for individual innovations—with, as a result, the emergence of various forms of collaborative innovation in different domains. The article concludes that the implications for the contribution of invention and innovation for global growth and development are significant.