Intellectual Property and Agricultural Science and Innovation in Germany and the United States

Abstract

In the 1950s and 1960s, prominent institutional economists in the United States offered what became the orthodox theory on the obstacles to commercializing scientific knowledge. According to this theory, scientific knowledge has inherent qualities that make it a public good. Since the 1970s, however, neoliberalism has emphasized the need to convert public goods to private goods to enhance economic growth, and this theory has had global impacts on policies governing the generation and diffusion of scientific research and innovation. We critique the foundational conceptualizations of scientific knowledge as either public or private by examining Germany’s treatment of scientific outputs as club goods. We then compare the relative impacts on social welfare of distinct United States and German approaches to food and agricultural research and innovation. We conclude with reflections on how these findings might contribute to a democratic debate on how best to manage scientific knowledge to enhance social welfare.

Where Did FinTechs Come From, and Where Do They Go? The Transformation of the Financial Industry in Germany After Digitalization

“… 4 The knowledge economics and organizational sociology literature streams describe several classes of problems related to the tasks of coordinating knowledge between different units or companies and determining whether an appropriability regime is tight or weak (Pisano, 1990 ; Nonaka, 1994 ; Heller and Eisenberg, 1998 ; Graff et al, 2003 ; Brandl and Glenna, 2016 ): (1) monitoring and enforcement problems due to the difficulty in determining who is using a certain technology and whether the users pay for it, (2) entitlement problems due to poorly defined and/or silent blocking of intellectual property rights, and (3) monitoring problems due to the difficulty of measuring and therefore contracting over certain types of technology or knowledge. …”

From Commodity to Asset and Back Again: Property in the Capitalism of Varieties

“…Unlike in the US (Brandl and Glenna 2017), Australia (Head et al 2012), or other countries, public wheat breeding has long been confined to basic research and resistance breeding in Germany while breeding by farmers themselves is virtually nonexistent (Harwood 2012;Brandl 2017). Farmers receive breeding companies' seed through commercial distributors (who usually also provide them with other farm input) at around €52 a quintal, the breeder's share (i.e., their income stream) in the final price making up €7.00-13.25, or 13 to 25 percent (2017 prices; STV 2018).…”

Toward understanding the governance of varietal and genetic diversity

“…Most researchers acknowledge that individual resource entities from plant breeding systems are multifaceted and do not fit this goods typology. They draw their readers' attention to different aspects of seed materials, such as the constructed cultural resource component of plant genetic resources (Halewood 2013), the informational component of seed breeding (Brandl et al 2014), the public good attributes of plant breeding research (Brandl and Glenna 2017), or intellectual property rights assigned to seed developed (Godt 2016). Sievers-Glotzbach et al (2020) provide an overview of literature on the different forms of seed commons in recent years.…”

“…Usually, a free market was deemed ideal for private goods and a hierarchical government for public goods. Yet, these ideotypes of governance prove impractical when looking at context-dependent situations like governing agricultural research for seed innovations (Brandl and Glenna 2017).…”

“…We want to know how processes that create biophysical information influence the coordination mechanisms of human-nature transaction in the relevant action situations. We base our choice of theories about these connections on the descriptions of our interviewees and on how secondary literature frames the respective activities as (1) cooperative undertaking of material exchange between seed businesses (Gerullis 2016, Brandl andGlenna 2017;observation 1, 2, 12, 19, 22, 23), (2) contracting and subcontracting in seed multiplication (Thiel 2014; observation 3 and 4), and (3) "the seed market" (Brandl et al 2014;Braun 2020; observations 1-9). We use economic theories of transaction to show the disparity in what is relevant for coordination mechanisms to function from the perspective of the economic ideal and what actors identify as relevant.…”