Sustainable innovation and intellectual property rights: Friends, foes or perfect strangers?

Abstract

This chapter aims to relation between sustainable innovation and Intellectual property rights (IPR) starting from the motives that sustainable innovators might have either to leverage or not to leverage IPRs in their strategies. Incentives for firms to engage in sustainable innovation are becoming stronger, both as internal drivers and as external pressures. The profiting from technological innovation framework of Teece has highlighted how companies can use a whole range of tools, both formal and informal, to capture the economic returns of their innovation efforts. ‘Sustainable innovation’ is a very broad term that has been linked to many different definitions. The sustainability element of the label typically refers to the three dimensions of environmental, social and economic sustainability, with most of the focus in the literature going to the first one, but increasingly also on the second one. Sustainable process innovation concerns changes to production and organizational processes in the direction of making those processes more sustainable.