تئوری بسته نرم افزاری مالکیت معنوی (IPB) : مدیریت هزینه های مبادله در توسعه فن آوری از طریق اداره شبکه ای

Technology is a bundle of inventions, which are increasingly protected by intellectual property rights. Typically, these rights are owned by multiple different entities, operating in different industries and countries. Moreover, once an invention protected by intellectual property right is incorporated in a product, it becomes very difficult to substitute it with an alternative technology, especially when the product has been widely adopted. Thus, technology creators must coordinate the disparate interests of various intellectual property owners in order to create useful technology. In this paper we introduce a new theory as an extension of transaction cost economics to explain the relative merits of different governance forms vis-à-vis the creation of technology that is a bundle of inventions. From this theoretical extension, we derive a number of testable hypotheses.

Technology development is an inventive process. To create a useful technology, developers must invent the solutions to a variety of interrelated problems. In fact, this is the dominant paradigm behind the object-oriented approach which holds that a useful technology is developed in components that perform a specific task and are reusable. However, what is little appreciated is the fact that many of these inventions can be and are protected and owned separately by way of intellectual property rights (IPR). For example, an Intel microprocessor is a complex combination of around 10,000 different patents bundled as a single product [25]. This view of technology as a bundle of intellectual property is new but important in the sense that it will fundamentally alter our perceptions about the nature of technology ownership. Table 1, below illustrates the numbers of entities and patents in some common technologies. Table 1. Number of patents and owners for some well known technologies (approximate numbers). Technology No. of patents No. of countries No. of patent holders DVD Media 500 28 9 MPEG 4 (Motion Pictures) 196 21 22 802.3 Ethernet 70 4 65 802.11 wireless 100 7 91 Table options There is a growing trend toward development of technology by multiple entities [13] and [33]. As of 2008, more than 450 such alliances, like the smart card and the Wi-Fi alliance, are listed on Consortiuminfo.org. Yet there is a widely held belief that development by groups results in slower development, greater setup costs, and even inferior technologies [15] and [26]. Even with such beliefs, which suggest that alliances have sub-par outcomes, we observe a large number of alliances and new ones being formed regularly. We theorize that the primary reason for this is the need to transact for intellectual property rights associated with the development of the technology. Beyond technical considerations, organizing technology development as an alliance helps developers locate and procure IPR and protects the technology from frivolous litigations. We introduce an Intellectual Property Bundle (IPB) theory as an extension of transaction cost theory [42] to understand how IPR give rise to transaction costs in the technology development area and how governance moderates those transaction costs. In the next section we present a literature review on transaction cost economics and intellectual property rights. Following that we discuss the assumptions and constructs of our theory. Then we describe the causal mechanism linking the constructs and propose testable hypotheses based on those constructs. We conclude with a discussion and directions for future research and implications.

This paper offers three major contributions. First, we develop the concept that technology is a bundle of inventions. By viewing technology as a bundle of inventions rather than an artifact or one of the other variety of representations we currently have, we argue that scholars and managers alike can find solutions to problems that are difficult to solve using a different perspective. The second lesson is that inventions or intellectual assets are different from physical assets. The third lesson of this work is to modify and extend traditional transaction cost theory, which is based on transactions involving a single physical asset, to take into account the problem of bundles of inventions. We theorize that IP networks may have higher setup costs, but also have a better ability to moderate the antecedents of transaction costs. Our theory provides a readymade analytic framework for a technology developer to choose a governance structure. Obviously, the developer in question will have to put numbers to the theory, but we believe we have made clear some of the transaction cost trade-offs of the different governance forms.