Author:

Keywords:

change of ownership, open innovation, patent assignments, patent law

Abstract:

In today’s knowledge-based economy, firms’ innovative efforts rely more and more on technological knowledge that is generated by entities that reside outside their boundaries. This trend towards more ‘open’ innovation processes has resulted in the licensing and trading of patent rights on a previously unprecedented scale. The initiation of such transactions relies to a great extent on the availability of information concerning ‘who-owns-what’. Although the patent system encourages the public disclosure of inventions – the ‘what’ – it does insufficiently warrant the disclosure of the identity of patent owners – the ‘who’.