Industrial Cooperation Project/ICP Questions

Questions

Main questions

• How are components of the industrial structure of information production systems changing in different industries, different business models, and different sets of actors?
• How are they incorporating commons-based strategy?
• How is the capital (funding, infrastructure, services) concentrated?

Complementary questions

• Who are the actors involved?
• Who are the actors leading the adoption of cooperation arrangements?
• Where in the value chain are cooperation arrangements being adopted?
• In early stages or very late stages, or related to positions on government policies toward market conditions such as best practices or standards?
• What are the cooperation arrangements that can be seen as cross-sector arrangements or practices? (like competitions, CC….some of them are standards efforts and others are incentive-shifting)
• What are the practices emerging from sustainable supply chain optimizations that can be seen as cooperation arrangements?
• What are the driving forces behind cooperation arrangements - funder mandates, institutional policy, experimentation, community credit?
• What is the weight of IP in these cooperation arrangements?
• Why some industries have made the leap while others have not?
• How would you rewire an industry that has not made the leap? What are the barriers?
• What are the tools for cooperation in use? Who is providing tools for cooperation and what are the types of clients looking for those?
• How replicable are these cooperation arrangements? What elements are common across different industries?
• How much awareness of cooperation arrangements can be identified in the research fields?
• How important are the traditional channels of cooperation or knowledge sharing such as conferences and public events? What new technological systems complement or replicate those channels (e.g. blogs replicating conference hallway conversation)?
• What typology can be built around these cooperation arrangements?
• What is the infrastructure cooperation arrangements need?
• What makes sector “A” work? Why they are not working in sector “B”?
• How much innovation is happening and in what environments? Ex.: informal sharing settings (ex.: climate change)

Research Outline

1. Part 1. An introduction providing an overview of economics of Intellectual Property in the sector under analysis, with the objectives of:
   • 1.1. provide a literature review of the IP debate in the sector. (Where and how IP is working or not, and what are the relevant topics around IP in this sector?)
   • 1.2. identify what are the other innovation incentives mentioned.
   • 1.3. find data on "how much of an increase of the tendency towards enclosure" characterizes the sector. (e.g. How much has patenting increased over time? Which actors cab be identified pushing this trend?)
2. Part 2. Provide an overall picture of the sector:
   • 2.1. How was this field born and how is it evolving?
   • 2.2. What are the main business models?
   • 2.3. What are the innovation dynamics in this field? (inputs/outputs, cycles of innovation/ disruptive or incremental innovation?)
   • 2.4. How does knowledge flow in this field?
   • 2.5. Is this field replicating models from other fields?
   • 2.6. How many companies and how concentrated is the sector?
   • 2.7. How much money do they make or how much money do they “move” in the American economy?
   • 2.8. How important is research from universities in this specific field?
   • 2.9. How important is public funding in this field?
   • 2.10. How important is private funding / venture capital in this field?
   • 2.11. Are there any specific public policies (from agencies, federal or state policies) that give incentives for openness or enclosure?
   • 2.12. What is the cost structure of the field?
   • 2.13. Who are the producers, the buyers, and the users?
   • 2.14. What is the structure of power from the production side and what is the structure of power in the demand side? (E.g., who has the power to control production and demand? How is the control distributed? How is the relation among producers, adopters, buyers, and users? Do these relations bring any market dysfunctions?)
3. Part 3. Define what kinds of market-segments are relevant and how the knowledge inputs for innovation in a certain sector are characterized. (e.g. In Biotechnology, we adopted the division of data, texts and tools as the main knowledge inputs and outputs in different moments of the biotechnology value chain)
4. Part 4. Define the main legal tools of protection (privatization) available for the field (patents, copyright, trademark, trade secrets, contracts, public domain) and the trends regarding their enforcement. Develop a matrix exercise on the trends and how they impact in openness or closedness of strategies.
5. Part 5. Define the competitive advantages in the field and the barriers of entry, and how this may impact in the emergence of common-based models.
6. Part 6. Identify the biggest for-profit companies in the sector (the sample should be of 10 firms maximum, based on their market share, their incumbent position and their importance in shaping the sector)
   • 6.1. How is the market distributed?
   • 6.2. Where are they located? Are there any incentives for specific locations?
   • 6.3. Correlate them with their main outputs and market segments.
   • 6.4. Correlate them with IP strategies.
   • 6.5. Identify how (and if) they contribute to the commons and if this is a “experimentation” or a clear “adopting” commons-based approaches
   • 6.6. Identify these cases and treat them as entities that will also be placed in our mapping device (the quadrants)
   • 6.7. Try to understand which companies use IP to enclose knowledge or to open knowledge as parts of its innovations strategies
7. Part 7. Identify the biggest non-for-profit institutions (public or private) in the sector (Repeat analysis of item 6 for item 7, adapting when it is needed)
8. Part 8. Identify the (5) top Universities in this field in terms of importance of R&D and innovation focused on the chosen sector. (Repeat analysis of item 6 for item 8, adapting when it is needed)
9. Part 9. Identify industry/universities/professional associations and civil society organizations that shape the IP discourse in the sector. Identify their policies, lobby, recommendations and/or best practices related to IP of their members.
10. Part 10. Identify commons-based cases or alternative open business models that emerged in the sector (Repeat analysis of item 6 for item 10, adapting when it is needed)
11. Part 11. Identify industry/universities/professional associations and civil society organizations that shape the IP discourse in the sector. Identify their policies, lobby, recommendations and/or best practices related to IP of their members.
12. Part 12. Identify and analyze private foundations that give grants in this field and how they shape the IP discourse.

Other questions or sensitivities that might be taken into consideration

• What are the possible antitrust issues related to this new cooperative arrangement?
• How do issues such as country security impact on cooperation arrangements?
• Are they seen as barriers? If yes, in what moment of the value chain?
• How does the culture (cooperative and national-legal culture) shape the potential for cooperation arrangements?

Other Resources

Lessons from ANT
[Defining the Commons]

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