Tuesday 28 April 2009

Trade Secrets v. Patents

If I may, I have request for assistance from readers. Against the sometimes overly patent-centric view of the IP world, we try to balance patents with trade secrets/know-how in the context of business management education. In that context, I like to mention to students that, to the best of my recollection, the OECD carried out a study some time ago that concluded that more technology is either created or transferred or exploited (all of the above; none of the above; other) via trade secrets than by inventions protected by patents. However, I have never succeeded in successfully locating the OECD report that supports this assertion.

Does anyone have a cite or even a lead to this putative OECD study? Or does anyone know of any other studies in this regard?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It's funny Neil. I'm studying for an LLM in IP in London and our lecturers told the class that you were the person who conducted the OECD study on the aforementioned topic.

Do you think they looked at this web page and misunderstood it?