Incentivising Innovation

This half-option is concerned with how the law seeks to incentivise innovation. There is an emerging awareness among intellectual property scholars that we need to stop looking at the patent system in isolation. We need to understand how the IP system relates to other policy interventions that are designed to incentivise innovation, including R&D tax credits and innovation prizes and rewards. Faced with problems like climate change, antimicrobial resistance and sluggish economic growth, it is more important than ever that we get innovation policy right and this requires working beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries. The course will provide you not merely with a solid understanding of the patent system, but also how this system fits within a broader innovation policy landscape. This half-option is distinctive of IP at Oxford and forms part of our commitment to rethinking how the subject is conceptualised, researched and taught.

Learning outcomes: a critical understanding of innovation as a contested concept; a good grasp of patent law, including controversial topics like ‘evergreening’ and the role of non-practising entities (‘patent trolls’); awareness of the potential and limitations of other policy interventions as mechanisms for incentivising innovation; an introduction to debates around innovation, short-termism and models of corporate governance.