Intellectual Property Research Research Articles

Potential and challenges of blockchain technology implementation in Higher Education: A systematic literature review

This study examined the potential applications and challenges of implementing blockchain technology within higher education systems. Blockchain, known for its decentralized and immutable nature, attracted significant interest due to its ability to provide secure, transparent, and efficient data management. In the context of higher education, blockchain has the potential to revolutionize academic record management, enhance verification processes, prevent fraud, and ensure the authenticity of credentials. This systematic literature review identified key use cases, such as academic credentialing, student data management, and the protection of intellectual property in research. Despite its promising potential, the adoption of blockchain in higher education, particularly in Indonesia, remained in its early stages. The study discussed major obstacles to implementation, including technical limitations, high costs, limited awareness, and regulatory barriers. Addressing these challenges required further research and collaboration between academic institutions, government agencies, and technology providers to enable widespread adoption. The review emphasized the need for a comprehensive framework to guide the practical implementation of blockchain, ensuring its benefits could be fully realized in educational environments.

Jurisprudence of intellectual property in research: African, western and modern perspectives

There is disagreement about entitlement to, and the scope, of intellectual property rights over research knowledge. This article explores jurisprudential perspectives on ownership of research knowledge. It also features the conflict between African and western conceptions of intellectual property, and how this has affected the exploitation of indigenous knowledge with the resultant impact on traditional knowledge institutions. In modern times, the allocation of rights is relatively settled in such relationships as between employer and employee, the researcher and the funder. Between researcher and publisher, digital technology, which ensures wider circulation, has led to claims for a re-definition of the relationship under which the researcher traditionally licensed his copyright to the publisher. A similar re-definition is called for with respect to research subjects in certain research environments. In particular, the result of research conducted with user-generated data in multi-sided business models like social media sites is implicated. The research finds that there is no generic solution that will apply to all relationships but that laws should be tailored to each relationship pair, in line with the suggestions in this paper. African traditional knowledge is denied protection by criteria such as non-disclosure because of the African collectivist notion of person. While Africans are collectivist, westerners are individualistic. It is concluded that on closer inspection there are analogues in African and western notions of intellectual property that could be used to resolve seeming conflicts and protect traditional knowledge.

How patents became documents, or dreaming of technoscientific order, 1895-1937

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to show how the documentation movement associated with the utopian thinkers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine relied on patent offices as well as the documents most closely associated with this institutional setting – the patents themselves – as central to the formation of the document category. The main argument is that patents not only were subjected to and helped construct, but also in fact engineered the development of technoscientific order during 1895–1937.Design/methodology/approachThe paper draws on an interdisciplinary approach to intellectual property, document theory and insights from media archeology. Focused on the historical period 1895–1937, this study allows for an analysis that encapsulates and accounts for change in a number of comparative areas, moving from bibliography to documentation and from scientific to technoscientific order. Primary sources include Paul Otlet’s own writings, relevant contemporary sources from the French documentation movement and theCongrès Mondial de la documentation universellein 1937.FindingsBy understanding patent offices and patents as main drivers behind those processes of sorting and classification that constitute technoscientific order, this explorative paper provides a new analytical framework for the study of intellectual property in relation to the history of information and documentation. It argues that the idea of the document may serve to rethink the role of the patent in technoscience, offering suggestions for new and underexplored venues of research in the nexus of several overlapping research fields, from law to information studies.Originality/valueDebates over the legitimacy and rationale of intellectual property have raged for many years without signs of abating. Universities, research centers, policy makers, editors and scholars, research funders, governments, libraries and archives all have things to say on the legitimacy of the patent system, its relation to innovation and the appropriate role of intellectual property in research and science, milieus that are of central importance in the knowledge-based economy. The value of this paper lies in proposing a new way to approach patents that could show a way out of the current analytical gridlock of either/or that for many years has earmarked the “openness-enclosure” dichotomy. The combination of intellectual property scholarship and documentation theory provides important new insight into the historical networks and processes by which patents and documents have consolidated and converged during the twentieth century.

Balanced score card implementation for IP rights management in a public research institution

PurposeThere is a growing awareness of intellectual property (IP) rights in European public research institutes. Since 2008 a non‐binding recommendation of the European Commission has been, in effect, proposing a consistent policy for IP in research and development (R&D). While there is a broad consensus on the overall goal – achieving a higher competitiveness of European industry in the international market place – there are, however, conflicting expectations on the micro‐management: are technology transfer agencies to be considered as profit‐centers, cost‐centers, mediators or all of the above? This paper seeks to provide an answerDesign/methodology/approachThe Physikalisch‐Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) is the national metrology institute of Germany with 1,900 employees and an annual budget of €145 million. It has established a micro‐management policy for IP rights, which is successfully fostering the development of modern instrumentation for metrology and may serve as an example for other public institutions as well. While it is obliged by law to operate as a regular market participant when licensing patents, there are additional conditions, some with the status of a law or a binding government decision as well.FindingsThe BSC approach, implemented at PTB, provides guidelines to reconcile seemingly conflicting requirements for a public entity while at the same time generating economic benefits in terms of additional income from licensing. In the authors' opinion this approach keeps costs at a reasonable level, fosters inventors' motivation and furnishes data for decisions for the technology transfer office as well as for the leadership of the institution.Originality/valueTo manage this conflict of goals the authors developed and implemented a balanced score card (BSC) system for IP management in order to optimize licensing income generation, cut costs, keep the inventor's motivation high and simultaneously realize macro‐economic technology transfer tasks. The BSC was originally introduced for the private sector by Norton and Kaplan in 1992, in response to a failure of purely monitoring financial indicators. The balanced score card considers economic and non‐economic factors, often denoted as “soft”. It is balanced with respect to result‐oriented indicators, like licensing income, and with respect to process‐oriented indicators, like the acceptance rate of inventions for patenting. And it tries to deduce from a trend of an indicator in the past a prediction of future development, associated with recommendations for actions to influence the ongoing process. The paper discusses the issues.

Managing intellectual property in a collaborative environment: learning from IBM

This paper outlines the increasing importance that intellectual property has achieved in inter-firm research and development collaborations with respect to the new economy industry sector. It is based on an explorative, case study-based research approach that was chosen because of the novelty of managing intellectual property in research and development collaborations as an empirical phenomenon. Starting from theoretically derived core components for managing intellectual property in research and development collaborations, this contribution analyses successful practices of a leading information technology and service innovation company, namely IBM, within the new economy sector. The paper concludes with a procedural model for managing intellectual property by asserting that its consideration is essential in conducting and exploiting a sustainable collaboration.