News 15 of 55

The School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology organized the Atlanta Conference on Science, Technology, and Policy 2007, with the theme “Challenges and Opportunities for Innovation in the Changing Global Economy”.

 

On October 19 and 20, 2007 more than 200 participants gathered at The Georgia Tech Global Learning Center in Atlanta, Georgia, USA, to discuss the impacts, actors and issues related to the globalization of the innovation process. The discussions addressed issues such as the shifting landscape of global innovation; national strategies to reflect this changing landscape; and what works, what doesn’t, and under what circumstances in today’s global economy and society. The Conference was especially relevant in a context where national governments are searching for new strategies within an environment where some are questioning the appropriateness of traditional national based policies.

 

Gustavo Crespi, Senior Program Officer from IDRC`s ITS program initiative, participated in the panel on “The Impact of Academic Patenting on University Research Outputs and Its Transfer”.  He and his co-panellists suggested that academic patenting is complementary to publishing at least up to a certain level of patenting output after which there is some evidence of a substitution effect. Their analysis suggested as well, that potential impact of patenting on the other channels of knowledge transfer, though limited by the smaller number of observors, seems to indicate that patenting does not have a negative impact on the other channels of knowledge exchange. On the contrary, they argue, it has some positive correlation between the stock of patents and the frequency of interaction especially in the case of joint research and contract research.  (This part seems quite technical, but maybe that is intended?)

 

News 15 of 55