Intellectual Property Resources for Innovators

Intellectual Property (IP) is an issue of utmost importance to inventors and innovators that is often overlooked.  In this post, we describe what IP is  and provide URLs with information about different IP topics of interest to people in the (open) innovation community.

According to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a specialized agency of the United Nations, Intellectual Property can be divided into two categories: Industrial Property, and Copyrights (http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/index.html). WIPO defines industrial property to include "inventions (patents), trademarks, industrial designs, and geographical indications of source" and copyright to include "literary and artistic works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs."

What is Innovation?

Innovation can be simply defined as "invention plus commercialization" (Christopher Freeman), or as "a new way of doing things that is commercialized" (Michael Porter).


The term "innovation" is sometimes used interchangeably with the term "invention", although the concepts are readily distinguished. In business, according to Wikipedia, "innovation can be easily distinguished from invention. Invention is the conversion of cash into ideas. Innovation is the conversion of ideas into cash."


Innovation begins with creativity, the generation of new and useful ideas. Well-known, practical creativity techniques include brainstorming, de Bono's Six Thinking Hats, and TRIZ (Theory of Inventive Problem Solving).


The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) says that there are essentially four types of innovation: product innovation; process innovation; marketing innovation and organisational innovation. Melissa Schilling, a prominent academic in Innovation Management, in her book Strategic Management of Technological Innovation, identifies four dimensions widely used to distinguish types of innovation: product versus process innovation, radical versus incremental innovation, competence-enhancing versus competence-destroying, and architectural versus component innovation.


We are Alex, Willings and Andreas, and currently study towards a Master of Science degree in the Management of Business, Innovation and Technology at Athens Information Technology. We have diverse experience in Research and Development, Telecom and Networking, Education, Business and Finance, Open-source development, and Patent Law. As part of a project for a very interesting course on E-business taught by Dr. Xenia Ziouvelou and Dr. Sofia Tsekeridou, we have decided to create this blog that will discuss in detail issues related to a relative new and hyped about innovation discipline, namely "Open Innovation" (OI). We plan to provide a general overview of OI, summarize leading-edge research on OI, define opportunities and challenges, and describe how OI is used in practice. We also plan to address two disciplines that are very much related to OI and are of interest to us: open source and intellectual proprietary rights.


We truly hope that you will enjoy our blog! Ideas and comments are always welcome.


The Open Innovation Team!
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