My research is centered on the strategic opportunities that come from policy gray-areas surrounding new, digital technologies.
innovation ✦ intellectual property ✦ economics of digitization ✦ piracy ✦ nascent industries
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My work explores the idea that digital technology has changed the nature of invention. Products that were previously held in your hand are now bits and bytes stored invisibly on the Internet. This has made the reproduction and distribution of digital goods by online communities much easier and, as a result, the protection from duplication and commercialization of these goods by firms much harder to achieve.
Before national and international legislators can design new legal institutions to protect competition and innovation, firms look to exploit strategic opportunities within these regulatory voids. This has paved the way for new business models and strategies within our data-driven economy. In my research, I measure and explain how some of these trends are evolving within (1) explicit and government-mandated institutions, such as patent pools; and (2) illicit and organically grown institutions, such as digital piracy. My work has implications for competition and social change within both established industries, such as ICT and movies, as well as nascent industries, such as the metaverse. My paper, “Software Piracy and IP Management Practices: Strategic Responses to Product-Market Imitation,” published in 2023 in Research Policy journal (co-author Julian Kolev, USPTO) won the Best Paper Award in Knowledge and Innovation at the 2019 Strategic Management Society (SMS) Annual Meeting, and it was recently cited in a variety of news articles, including The Register, TorrentFreak, the Y Combinator, and Today UK News, collectively reaching over 40 million readers. |
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