Workshop Description

This course proposes to collate economic, strategic, and legal aspects of patents to underscore the relevance of these rights in gaining a competitive advantage over rivals. Increasingly, getting a competitive advantage over rivals depends on the firm’s innovative activity. Each firm plans to create a niche, preferably based on technology, to capture super-normal profits or economic rents. The focus becomes to develop and sustain core competencies in such a way that firms do better than others. Most importantly, technology has gained prominence in the modern world, allowing it to achieve such competencies instead of natural resources. In addition, recent developments in platforms economy, networks, and the growing interconnectedness of the technology ecosystem have posed challenges and created opportunities for firms. Thus, in this course, we aim to understand the linkages between technology creation and its usage through firms’ patent rights. The goal is to go beyond the traditional role of patents limited to merely protecting innovation and strategically use patents as assets for competitive and commercial gains.