Institute News

His main research areas are Organization and Innovation, Innovation Research, Strategic Management and Behavioral and Experimental Economics.

Marco Kleine has been working as a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in the Department Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research headed by Dietmar Harhoff. He played a major role in the successful establishment and operation of econlab (Max Planck Laboratory for Experimental Research in the Social Sciences). In 2018/19, he served as an interim Professor of Strategic Management at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich.

Marco Kleine has published his research results in renowned international journals such as the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization and Research Policy. Currently, he is working on the role of user anonymity in organizational exchange platforms and the influence of innovation vouchers on the innovation performance of small and medium-sized enterprises.

His activities at the University of Groningen include research and teaching in the fields of innovation and strategy. He continues to be closely associated with the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition as an Affiliated Research Fellow.

During a year abroad as a schoolboy, the Australian discovered his love of Britain and Europe and, back in Australia, felt cut off from the world. In 1960, after studying law at the University of Adelaide in Australia, he returned to the United Kingdom and applied himself for postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford. As early as 1962, he began teaching as a lecturer at the London School of Economics, where he had a fateful encounter. An exchange with his colleague and friend Otto Kahn-Freund sparked an interest in Intellectual Property Law, which had hardly been developed in England until then.

Bill Cornish had a special relationship with our Institute: In an interview in 2015, Cornish reported that Munich became the most important research site in the field of Intellectual Property in Germany from 1966 onwards with the foundation of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law (as the Institute was called at the time) and that he paid his first visit to this “intellectual Mecca” in 1978, during research for his textbook on Intellectual Property. Many more visits were to follow.

He played a formative role in the Institute’s journal IIC - International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law as a member of the Editorial Board from 1990 to 2019.

Bill Cornish researched and taught at the most important universities in England, including Cambridge, the London School of Economics and Oxford, and was elected a member of the British Academy in 1984. He received numerous scientific and social awards and honors.

We have lost not only an outstanding scholar, but also a very warm-hearted person and good friend. We will miss him very much.

Detailed information on the life and work of William R. Cornish as well as an extensive obituary can be found on the pages of the University of Cambridge.

The two-day event was again organized by doctoral students of the Department for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research headed by Dietmar Harhoff to give young scholars the opportunity to present and discuss their work.

In light of the continuing global health crisis, the workshop took place online. However, this was no obstacle to putting together an exciting program. Eleven doctoral students presented their papers on the Economics of Innovation, Science and Entrepreneurship. Their work was then discussed by experienced researchers. A special highlight of the event was the inspiring keynote speech by Catherine Tucker, the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management Science and Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The workshop was kicked off with a session on Entrepreneurship. The first speaker of the day presented research on high-growth entrepreneurship education in the context of a developing country. The second presentation addressed the understanding of probabilistic reasoning in entrepreneurship by studying the effects of applying a scientific way of decision-making in an entrepreneurial and uncertain context.

The highlight of the first day was the keynote speech by Catherine Tucker who presented research on Data and Inequality. An interactive discussion emerged on how data can lead to inequality and how it can on the other hand be used to reduce inequality.

A session on Global Science followed, where researchers first presented their work on the impact of a large-scale scientist recruitment program on Chinese research productivity. Another interesting topic in the context of global science was a life cycle analysis of researcher migration and changes in research interest.

The second day started with insights into Determinants of Firm Innovation. Kicking off the workshop day, young scholars talked about startups, unicorns and local inventor supply ‒ showing that high-growth entrepreneurship depends on the availability of high-skilled inventors’ human capital. A second presentation addressed the question of how metrics shape the rate and direction of innovation in firms based on the example of automotive safety and data from the US automotive industry.

The next session investigated Privacy and Innovation. Evidence from mobile gaming shed light on the question whether user privacy stifles innovation in platform ecosystems. The workshop continued with the topics Data-Driven Search and Innovation, and the consequences of machines ‘blackboxing’ knowledge production. Last but not least, researchers addressed the Determinants of Idea Creation and Innovation by presenting evidence on the role of ownership empowerment for promoting novelty creation, and by asking whether experts acquire knowledge through reviewing research projects.

See the complete program with all topics here and check out the coverage on Twitter under #RISE4Workshop.

The RISE workshop series aims at stimulating a rigorous in-depth discussion of a selected number of research papers by Ph.D. students and Junior Postdocs, providing feedback and connecting with peers from other research institutions. Accordingly, the workshop brings together young researchers from all over Europe, Asia, and North America with researchers from the Munich Innovation Community.

We thank all organizing parties involved and all participants, including the fantastic keynote speaker, thorough discussants and great presenters for a truly outstanding RISE4 Workshop 2021. Our special thanks go to everyone who worked so hard on the organization, especially Svenja Frieß, Klaus Keller, Kathrin Wernsdorf and Ann-Christin Kreyer. With great enthusiasm and motivation, we look forward to the RISE5 Workshop 2022 ‒ then hopefully again in person at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition in Munich.

The SIPLA initiative is based on the idea that intellectual property protection can only bring sustainable benefits to an economy if local market and competitive conditions and the specific needs of the country concerned are considered. Free trade agreements concluded by countries in Latin America often take too little account of this, especially when contracting partners try to assert the interests of their own industries.

In the course of the collaborations, the aim is now to determine specifically which adjustments to the respective legal framework can actually help to promote technology transfer and local innovation. This also includes sufficient flexibility in the digital context, for example in the form of specific exemption regulations that allow text and data mining in the context of artificial intelligence.

The collaboration partners plan to publish their findings in a variety of formats, such as short publications on timely topics, interim reports on strategic issues, and more comprehensive edited volumes. Among other activities, the researchers will exchange ideas in workshops and seminars and also organize events to inform the public about results.
 

Development of Intellectual Property Law in Latin America
 

In the opening chapter of a recent anthology in memory of Brazilian legal scholar Denis Borges Barbosa, the SIPLA team traces the development of intellectual property law in Latin America and provides an outlook on what opportunities these countries can take advantage of to promote their economic development. In particular, national legislatures can make targeted use of the leeway left to them by international law.

The researchers conclude that countries in the region have the potential not only to overcome existing challenges, but also to contribute to solving global problems in specific sectors through their own innovation.
 

About SIPLA
 

Smart IP for Latin America is a research initiative of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. It provides a neutral forum for academic and legal policy discourse on intellectual property and competition law in Latin America. It aims to inform and advise academia, policymakers, the business sector and the public on the basis of impartial and evidence-based fundamental research. The goal is to support the realization of Latin America’s social, cultural, and economic potential.

Smart IP for Latin America was launched in 2018 at an inaugural conference in Santiago de Chile, attended by representatives from academia, government, industry, and legal practice. An office at the University of Buenos Aires – the “Observatory” – has been coordinating research activities and events on site in close cooperation with the SIPLA team at the Institute in Munich since 2019. The team is supported by a top-class advisory board with scientific representatives from all over Latin America.

Silke von Lewinski, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute, drafted the proposal for the second directive in the field of copyright for the European Commission, for which she invented the model of the collecting society-linked direct remuneration claim, which was also implemented in the German Act on Copyright Liability of Online Content Sharing Service Providers in 2021 for the benefit of authors and artists. She was a member of the EC delegation and deputy head of the German delegation to the WIPO Diplomatic Conferences on the WCT/WPPT and the Beijing and Marrakesh Treaties.

Silke von Lewinski has published several standard works on international and European copyright law and has taught for many years as a visiting professor at numerous universities in the USA, China and Europe. In 2020, she was appointed as »Izvanredne profesorice« (Associate Professor) at the Faculty of Law of the University of Zagreb.

Personal Website of Silke von Lewinski