Intellectual Property Law

How financial innovation causes crises
Nicola Gennaioli, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Vishny have a great new paper out entitled "Financial Innovation and Financial Fragility".* It doesn't break a lot of new conceptual ground, but it's very thought-provoking, and it helps to codify in a formal way the serious problems with financial innovation...

The silver lining to synthetic CDOs
One of the more thought-provoking bits of the Shleifer paper on financial innovation is this part of the model:

Collaborative Innovation And ICTs Could Give Economy Back Its Colours
Innovation and technology will be key to emergence from the global economic crisis, according to speakers at a recent United Nations conference on innovation-based competitiveness. However, innovation should be collaborative and involve resources inside and outside companies and institutions.

Quoting Scripture
Just juicy miscellany today... with a comment at the end. The publishing industry is filled with inept businesscreatures who don't understand their own business; consider these publishers whingeing about low profits as barrier to innovation...

The Law and Economics of Innovation: Patents and the Commercialization of Innovation
Posted by D. Daniel Sokol George Mason University School of Law and Microsoft Corporation announce the second in an annual series of conferences The Law and Economics of Innovation: Patents and the Commercialization of Innovation May 15, 2008, Arlington, VA...

Searching For China Innovation. Don't Go Looking In Federal Way.
David Wolf of Silicon Hutong has a very thoughtful post up on innovation in China. The post is entitled "Searching for China's Soul of innovation," and it nicely takes us through China's interrupted history of innovation and posits whether China will become a great innovator again, what it might take for that to happen, and what that might mean if it does...