تجزیه و تحلیل اثربخشی هزینه بیکالوتامید برای درمان کمکی سرطان اولیه پروستات

As innovation becomes an ever more central issue for the development of firms and world economies, so the need for improved assessments of innovative performance grows more urgent. This paper suggests that trademark analysis can contribute in capturing relevant aspects of innovation phenomena and the process of industrial change. We propose trademarks as a complementary indicator in the portfolio of available empirical tools of innovation studies and industrial dynamics. Our empirical exploration is based on a study of community trade marks (CTM), an intellectual property right granted in the European Union, and draws on recent research on trademarking trends in Portugal. Quantitative as well as qualitative data, including survey data from a representative sample of Portuguese manufacturing and services firms, are used to identify the advantages and limitations of this indicator.

The business of branding products has long been part of ordinary economic life. Trademarks are the outcome of establishing recognisable designations and symbols for goods and services, as well as firms’ identities. They play a crucial role in the process of marketing innovations, being instrumental in differentiating the attributes of goods and services in the marketplace. These characteristics make trademarks a potential indicator of product innovation and sectoral change. Moreover, recent developments in the institutions for the international regulation of trademarks, as well as the increasing availability of digital databases, have increased the case for using trademark statistics as a new source of information in industrial and innovation studies. Trademarks are of interest for social science research for at least three reasons: they confer the exclusive right to use a brand, therefore enhancing companies’ ability to appropriate the economic returns on new and existing products; they are an important aspect of contemporary culture world-wide; and they constitute a source of qualitative and quantitative information on socio-economic activities. This paper focuses on the third of these features. It does not address the more complex issue of the contribution of trademarks to welfare, which might be considered an urgent question for political economy in its own right.1 More specifically, the paper assesses the possibilities and problems of using trademark data when analysing the introduction of new or improved products in competitive markets. Along with a methodological reflection, the paper offers a concrete empirical application of the indicator to the EU-15 countries2 together with an in-depth study of an intermediate European economy, Portugal, for which we analyse: (i) statistical data on trademarks for the period since 1980; (ii) survey data collected from a representative sample of 724 firms in 2003; and (iii) information from thematic workshops held with entrepreneurs, managers and consultants. Data for the EU-15 countries was obtained from publicly available documents of the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), which is responsible for managing community trade marks (CTMs). The lessons learned from the Portuguese case synthesise and elaborate on a study recently published by the Portuguese Patent and Trademark Office, INPI (Godinho et al., 2003). We argue that trademark-based indicators provide a partial measure of the innovative output of profit-oriented organisations. In its most simple formulation innovation can be understood as the introduction into the market of a new idea, product or production process. As an intellectual property right (IPR), trademarks are designed to differentiate certain products from those provided by other firms. In this context, the filing of new trademarks by economic actors partially reflects the introduction of new offerings aimed at persuading potential buyers that the range of their problems is not being solved by the supply of solutions currently available in the market. In this way, since companies have to pay fees to register and renew their rights in national and international offices, the effort involved in filing for a new brand name or logo reveals an economic decision that is worth investigating. Furthermore, given the growing demand from governments, firms and academics for more reliable information on innovation, we find here an opportunity to test trademarks as a complementary indicator to the more traditional measures of innovative activity, namely R&D expenditure and patents. Trademarks are used by a wider set of business firms, capturing change in service activities as well as in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The question this paper set out to answer was “what can we learn from trademarks as an indicator of innovation and industrial evolution?” The objective was to test trademarks as an indicator of product innovation activity and as a measure correlated with structural change in contemporary economies. Brands are a very important part of firms’ marketing plans and strategies. They are used to protect firms’ products and business identity, but also for other purposes, such as product differentiation and business diversification. Firms make a huge (and increasing) use of brands as a (dynamic) competition tool. As a result, applications for service trademarks boomed in the 1990s, and this trend was led by information-(or knowledge)-based services such as Business Consultancy, Telecommunications and Education. Within the EU-15 group, a number of small countries seem to exhibit very strong marketing capabilities, namely the Nordic countries, plus Ireland and Austria. The analysis of more detailed data on Portugal revealed that the country is lagging behind in terms of marketing capabilities, which are critical for supporting innovation and trade competitiveness in external markets. However, Portugal is showing clear signs of structural change. It has been following the general trend towards an increase in service trademarking. This observation is compatible with the evidence from the CTM database on the dynamism of knowledge services in recent years. Moreover, the composition of this trend is biased towards education, research and business consultancy categories. Evidence from the Portuguese case suggests that companies which tend to use one kind of IPR also use other IPRs. This is in keeping with the CIS results that were analysed in Section 3. And it further implies that high-technology sectors, which use more patents, also make a more intensive use of trademarks. The data from a survey of Portuguese firms also shows that the service industries usually classified as intensive users of information are the ones that use most trademarks. Combined with the increasing availability of electronic data, these results indicate an interesting opportunity for using trademarks as indicators of innovation and industrial change. We have argued that trademark data can serve the purpose of acting as a partial output indicator of innovations introduced into the goods and services markets and can therefore be used as an empirical yardstick for measuring overall changes in the patterns of economic activity. This can be especially useful for advancing research in innovation studies, industrial dynamics and international economics, as well as in economic and business history. We therefore conclude that new knowledge about innovation and industrial change can be acquired by including trademark analysis in the box of empirical tools. However, more work needs to be done in order to better understand the potential uses and limitations of this new source of data. The fact that much still remains to be learned is the best of the good news.