Private and public values of innovation

Abstract

Emerging science and technology fields are increasingly expected to provide solutions to societal grand challenges. The promise of such solutions underwrites much public research funding. Universities, public research organizations and private enterprises draw on such research to secure patent property rights over potential applications. Patents represent a claim to economic returns from the novel outcomes of science and technology, justified by the social value promised through encouraging information sharing, further R&D investment, and useful applications. Despite the notion of the social utility of inventions as a patenting condition, and evidence of disconnection between societal needs and the goals of private actors, there is less analytical attention to public value interpretations. After considering legal, business, social and policy dimensions of patenting, we undertake a qualitative examination of patent content in synthetic biology, contributing a new analytical classification of private and public values. We probe the private and public value propositions framed in these patents in terms of potential private and public benefits of research and innovation. We shed light on questions of the values being nurtured in inventions in synthetic biology and discuss how further attention to public as well as private values opens up further promising avenues of research.