Isaac, Grant E. --- "Intellectual Property Policies and Scale Neutrality: Strategic Management Implications for SMEs" [2006] ELECD 326; in Pugatch, Perez Meir (ed), "The Intellectual Property Debate" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: The Intellectual Property Debate

Editor(s): Pugatch, Perez Meir

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845420383

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: Intellectual Property Policies and Scale Neutrality: Strategic Management Implications for SMEs

Author(s): Isaac, Grant E.

Number of pages: 15

Extract:

6. Intellectual property policies and
scale neutrality: strategic
management implications for SMEs
Grant E. Isaac

I. INTRODUCTION

As the title of this volume suggests, there are many debates associated with
intellectual property policies which can be assessed from legal, economic
and political economy perspectives. Often, the unit of analysis for these
debates is the nation-state level where the questions posed deal with issues
such as the welfare gains and losses resulting from intellectual property
policies as well as the governance of intellectual property regimes. Yet,
given the fact that intellectual property policies are ­ to a large part ­
designed to encourage innovation among private organizations, adopting
an organization-level unit of analysis is crucial. Doing so deepens the
assessment of intellectual property policies by explicitly linking the legal,
economic and political economy perspectives with the strategic manage-
ment perspective.
An important intellectual property policy debate at the level of the
organization has to do with the scale neutrality of various intellectual prop-
erty policy instruments such as patents. In a general sense, policy instru-
ments that are scale neutral create symmetric strategic incentives for firms
regardless of firm size (measured in terms of revenues and/or employees).
Policy instruments that are not scale neutral create asymmetric strategic
incentives for firms based on their size (Weidenbaum, 2004; Persson and
Tabellini, 2000; Bernheim and Bagwell, 1988).
Consider first scale-neutral policy instruments such as constituent policy
instruments that are designed to level the playing field for all actors regard-
less of scale. ...