(Courtesy: NY Times)A recent study has found that, on an average, patents, excluding the ones girding the pharmaceutical companies, smaller companies and individual inventors, do more financial harm than good to the company. This is true especially for the IT companies. Apparently, most companies end up spending more in litigation costs than they receive in royalties. Worse yet, there is data to show that the companies that do the most R&D are sued the most.
Is the economy being driven to a point where companies don't have any incentive to do research unless it helps them increase their revenue through products?
Update: If you're unable to access the NYTimes article, and if you'd like me to send it to you, do let me know your email id through a comment (use 'at' for '@' and 'dot' for '.' to avoid any spam scripts from picking up the id)
2 comments:
Academic research and industrial research are being milked like anything here in the US - academic research's only motive seems to be more pay to the prof during summer months and industrial research is mired in crap such as this.
I've not seen much of that happening when in school. My prof hardly had funding let alone funding from patents :)
But you're right, and in a sense that is good to keep the pace of the research up.
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