Institute News

The Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (Expertenkommission Forschung und Innovation - EFI) provides scientific advice to the German Federal Government and periodically delivers reports on research, innovation and technological productivity in Germany. A key task is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the German innovation system in an international comparison. Furthermore, Germany's perspectives as a location for research and innovation are evaluated on the basis of the latest research findings. EFI presents proposals for national research and innovation policy.

The Summer Institute 2017 will focus on three areas:

• Digitization, Strategy and Organization (chairs: Jörg Claussen and Tobias Kretschmer),
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship (chair: Dietmar Harhoff), and
• Law & Economics of Intellectual Property and Innovation (chair: Stefan Bechtold).

The goal of the Munich Summer Institute is to stimulate a rigorous in-depth discussion of a select number of research papers and to strengthen the interdisciplinary international research community in these areas.

Researchers in economics, law, management and related fields at all stages of their career (from Ph.D. students to full professors) may attend the Munich Summer Institute as presenters in a plenary or a poster session, as discussants or as attendants.

The Munich Summer Institute will feature three keynote lecturers, 18 plenary presentations and a daily poster session (including a poster slam). Paper presentations will be grouped by topics, not discipline or method.

The Munich Summer Institute will be held at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in the heart of Munich. Partizipation is by invitation only. The organizers will fund travel and hotel expenses for all plenary speakers and hotel expenses for all poster presenters and invited discussants.

Key speakers are:

• Michael Frakes (Duke University),
• Ajia Leiponen (Cornell University), and
• Mirjam van Praag (Copenhagen Business School).

Paper selections will be announced at the beginning of March. The program of the Munich Summer Institute will be available on April 1, 2017. Final papers are due for circulation among conference participants on May 1, 2017. Accepted papers will be made available to conference participants on a protected website. Researchers who would like to attend the Munich Summer Institute without giving a presentation should contact one of the organizers by May 1, 2017.

More information is available at http://munich-summer-institute.org. Any questions concerning the Munich Summer Institute should be directed to Stefan Bechtold, Jörg Claussen, Dietmar Harhoff or Tobias Kretschmer.

Press release

Members of the network, which was founded in 1999 to intensify cooperation between European institutions in the field of intellectual property and their students, are the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (MIPLC), Queen Mary University of London, University of Strasbourg (CEIPI), Alicante University and Maastricht University.

A total of 15 doctoral candidates will be accepted into the program, which will receive EU funding in the amount of 3.8 million euros over a period of four years. Each of the EIPIN member institutions will supervise three doctoral candidates and act as co-supervisor for three further candidates being advised by one of the other EIPIN member institutions. Also planned in the framework of the doctoral program are internships with leading European organizations in innovative sectors of the economy (e.g. telecommunications, music, seeds) and seminars (e.g. on methodology). Furthermore, participants are intended to participate in the annual EIPIN congress.

EIPIN submitted its proposal, entitled “EIPIN Innovation Society”, in January 2016 within the framework of the EU’s Horizon 2020 program. The goal of the proposal is to investigate the effects of intellectual property rights (IPRs) on the innovation potential of a society as well as how best to design IPRs in order to facilitate and not check innovation.

For EIPIN Member MIPLC the University of Augsburg will be the institution awarding the doctoral degree. The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, which acted as a supporting institution for the grant proposal and is one of the sponsors of the MIPLC, will collaborate with the University of Augsburg in the running of the program and will provide supervisors for the doctoral candidates.

The Ministry had commissioned the Max Plank Institute for Innovation and Competition to prepare the study in order to provide a better empirical basis for legal-political discussions of copyright law in the digital age.

Digitalization is a key driver for innovations and the emergence of new business models. Internet-based value-creation processes are increasingly changing the basic conditions for creativity while at the same time opening up new ways to disseminate and use many different types of content. Accordingly, copyright as a legal instrument to promote innovation and creativity is also confronted with new challenges. Its role in this context must be determined not only from a legal, but also from an economic perspective. Basic groundwork for this task includes charting and analyzing those technological and economic changes that digitalization and interconnectedness entail. Trends regarding technological developments and value-creation models are particularly visible in the kinds of young enterprises that are currently introducing innovative, internet-based business models. If there is a connection between their business models and copyright law, this connection can make it possible to draw conclusions as to which basic legal conditions might influence innovation in digital markets in a positive or a negative way.

For the study, 40 startups with internet-based business models were surveyed, whereby “startup” was defined as an enterprise under ten years old implementing an innovative business model or innovative technology and striving for significant growth. The goal of the interviews with the startups was to determine which parameters of copyright law the entrepreneurs saw as containing a potential for conflict with their own business model. Thus the first step was to determine what role copyright-protected content played in the creation of value and who the authors of this content were. Next, it was ascertained what copyright-related questions, insecurities or risks arose for the startups with regard to this content. Finally, the entrepreneurs were asked how they responded to these challenges in their day-to-day business.

The study was commissioned by the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection and carried out jointly by the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition and the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM). A multidisciplinary analysis taking technical, economic and legal aspects into account, the study reveals many of the challenges faced by German copyright law with respect to innovation in digital markets. The work thus provides an empirical basis for drafting proposals for a reform of German copyright law.

“Revolutionizing Innovation: Users, Communities, and Open Innovation”, edited by Dietmar Harhoff (Director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition) and Karim R. Lakhani (Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School), has now been published by MIT Press (https://mitpress.mit.edu).
 

The volume provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of the field of user and open innovation, reflecting advances in the field over the last several decades. The book is dedicated to the economist Eric von Hippel who, since the 1980s, pioneered a groundbreaking view of innovation. Von Hippel shows that in many cases users of products and services create innovations and that subsequently producers take up these innovations and develop them further. Thus he counters the dominant paradigm which casts profit-seeking firms as the main drivers of technological and organizational change. In their research projects, von Hippel and colleagues found empirical evidence that flatly contradicted the producer-centered model of innovation. Large parts of the knowledge economy now routinely rely on user innovation, communities, and open innovation to solve important technological and organizational problems.
 

The contributors to the volume—including many colleagues of Eric von Hippel—offer both theoretical and empirical perspectives from such diverse fields as economics, the history of science and technology, law, management, and policy.
 

On 17 March 2016, 6:00 -8:00 p.m., Eric von Hippel himself will give a lecture about “Free Innovation and the Internet” at the new Munich Center for Internet Research (MCIR) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities addressing the question how the internet modifies innovation. The presentation followed by a discussion can also be watched via live stream (http://www.mcir.badw.de/). The viewers may ask questions via live chat. See also: http://www.ip.mpg.de/en/the-institute/events/free-innovation-and-the-internet.html.

Press release

On February 17, 2016, the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation chaired by Prof. Dietmar Harhoff, Ph.D., Director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation, has presented the ninth report on research, innovation and technological performance in Germany to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (Expertenkommission Forschung und Innovation - EFI) provides scientific advice to the German Federal Government and periodically delivers reports on research, innovation and technological productivity in Germany. A key task is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the German innovation system in an international comparison. Furthermore, Germany's perspectives as a location for research and innovation are evaluated on the basis of the latest research findings. EFI presents proposals for national research and innovation policy.

On February 25, 2015, the Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation chaired by Prof. Dietmar Harhoff, Ph.D., Director at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation, has presented the eighth report on research, innovation and technological performance in Germany to the German chancellor Angela Merkel. The Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (Expertenkommission Forschung und Innovation - EFI) provides scientific advice to the German Federal Government and periodically delivers reports on research, innovation and technological productivity in Germany. A key task is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the German innovation system in an international comparison. Furthermore, Germany's perspectives as a location for research and innovation are evaluated on the basis of the latest research findings. EFI presents proposals for national research and innovation policy.

Participating researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition are Dietmar Harhoff, director at the institute and head of the economics department, and Frank Mueller-Langer, Senior Research Fellow.

Empirical studies to verify and refine theoretical models are increasingly important in economics. This is reflected in a rising number of empirical contributions to journals where the authors have collected their own research data or used external datasets. However, so far there have been few effective means to replicate this research data within the framework of the corresponding article in order to verify it, to make it available for repurposing or to use it to support scholarly debate.

The DFG-funded project EDaWax is intended to meet these challenges. One of the main objectives is the development of a publication-related data archive for journals.

During the first phase of the project, analysis systematically redacted the current challenges as manifested mainly by the lack of incentive structures for the replication of research results and the multiple use of data. At the same time, currently existing technical and organizational solutions within the context of economics journals and data archives were analysed and investigated with regard to their suitability for the requirements of the EDaWax project and with particular attention to the legal framework.

During the second phase of the project, for which the funding has now been granted, a metadata schema for the description and labelling of the data will be developed, based on the results of this analysis. A set of rules for the schema-compliant transformation of the descriptions and data will also be established.

Further information:

EDaWaX II - Enhancing the project's pilot application towards an integrated solution for managing research data in economics journals

ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften

EDaWaX - European Data Watch Extended