Innovation Rights And The Innovation Wetlands

Professor Eric von Hippel (MIT Sloan School of Management) and I have now posted on SSRN a draft of our new article, entitled "Protecting the Right to Innovate: Our 'Innovation Wetlands'."  Our article is free to download from SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Individual citizens have been found to be a major source of new product and service innovations of value both to themselves, and to the economy at large. These individuals operate in a little-understood legal environment that we call the innovation wetlands. We show via a review of fundamental rights guaranteed in the US Constitution and elsewhere that individuals in the US participating in the innovation wetlands have strong legal protections with respect to both their freedom to innovate and their right to diffuse information about their innovations to others. However, we also show that legislation and regulation — often promulgated without awareness of consumer innovation as a valuable resource — can, in practice, significantly interfere with individuals’ exercise of their fundamental freedom to innovate. This interference can cost society dearly.

We offer three approaches to protecting the valuable resource of innovation by individuals from excessive negative impacts caused by legislation and regulation. First, we propose enhancing general awareness of the issue by framing the concept of individual innovation rights as an "innovation wetlands" that must be protected. Second, we describe the legislative and regulatory frameworks and practices that demark today’s innovation wetlands, as experienced by individual and collaborating innovators. Third, we suggest improvements that can strengthen protection of the innovation wetlands, including heightening awareness of the issue in existing, mandated cost-benefit analyses that are already applied, although imperfectly, to regulation in the US.

I have had the great fortune of being a Visiting Scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management for the past two years, and owe Eric von Hippel a debt of gratitude for being such a wonderful host and colleague.  He and I will further refine our new article on the "Innovation Wetlands" over the coming months.