Search results

Since 2015, China has made efforts to reform its intellectual property rights (IPR) system to better protect and stimulate innovation. These reforms are a result of the demand for more stringent intellectual property (IP) protection from China’s domestic, innovative industries and a measure to ease the pressure exerted by its foreign trading partners, particularly against the background of the US-China trade dispute that started at the beginning of 2018. This paper summarizes these reforms and their implications.

This paper combines a variety of sources, including academic articles, government websites, news reports, industry surveys and expert opinions, to offer insights in China’s IPR system and its recent reforms.

This paper summarizes and discusses (1) the state’s law amendments, including the 2015 amendment of the “Law on Promoting the Transformation of Scientific and Technological Achievements”, the second amendment of the “Anti-Unfair Competition Law” with regard to trade secret protection, the fourth amendment of the “Patent Law”, and the legislations and regulations addressing the criticisms of the US administration over China’s so-called “forced” technology transfer policies; (2) the establishment of the specialized IP courts and tribunals since 2014; (3) the restructuring of the State IP Office; and (4) the issuing of an “Outline for Building an IPR Powerhouse (2021–2035)”.

This paper highlights China’s efforts to make its IPR system stronger and more just. It also discusses international observers’ reactions and pinpoints specific areas for further improvement.

This paper aims to verify how the intellectual property (IP) box affects firms’ effective tax rate, growth and innovation activity outcomes related to intellectual property rights.

Implementing the innovation box regimes into the tax system intends to encourage firms to engage in more innovative activities. In UK, Italy and Poland, the IP box tax relief was introduced in 2013, 2015 and 2019, respectively. In return, companies may reduce their tax rate to increase their investment and innovativeness. With a panel model approach – system GMM and DiD with multiple time periods – it analyses data from the Orbis database for 2011–2019 of 673 firms from the gaming industry in 11 countries and hand-collected data on intellectual property rights protection. The authors study public and private companies from the gaming sector in leading European markets and all three countries that protect intellectual property rights of software (Japan, South Korea, the USA).

Recent reforms enable gaming companies to use preferential tax treatment for IP-related income and significantly impact a firm’s revenue growth.

Nevertheless, European gaming firms require time to leap the gap to the growth and innovativeness of countries that protect software.

The authors show that the IP box stimulates gaming firms to protect IP via wordmarks, figurative marks, trademarks and software patents that bring effects in five years. Despite the critics against IP box, the authors prove its lagged efficiency, especially in profitable and larger firms.

This research aimed to conceptualize organizations as open and purposeful systems to study how organizational culture (OC) influences firms' Innovative Performance (IP). The authors proposed goal setting and internal integration/external adaptation paradox as central to explaining OC's mediating and suppressing effects on IP.

The authors collected data from 372 Costa Rican organizations and analyzed them with structural equations. This research used the Denison Model instead of the usual typology-based approaches.

The mission had a direct and high impact on IP. The mediated effect via adaptability was also elevated, as well as the suppressor effect through consistency. There was no effect on IP of involvement. According to these results, the Open and Rational Systems Framework emerge as the main theoretical explanatory concepts.

Disaggregating the OC through a performance-oriented dimensional model makes it possible to study the dynamics between the elements that compound it and facilitate integrating these findings with other research streams.

There is no proposed solution to address the unresolved issues of constructing the Chinese university intellectual property information service system (IPISS) to promote the whole process service efficiency of IP creation, utilization, protection and management. The purpose of this paper is to propose a complete system, including theoretical framework and system development which addresses the existing difficulties to IP create, protect and transfer for researchers in universities. The paper shares the practice of utilizing the system developed by Wuhan University IP research team known as Wuhan University Intellectual Property Information Service System (WHU-IPISS).

First, the IPISS of 23 universities in China was investigated on the internet. Aiming at the deficiencies of the system, such as single service type, lack of patent display window, low management efficiency. This paper constructs the theoretical framework, proposes the IP ecological chain model, divides it into four sub-chains and carries on the functional design. Further, under the theoretical framework, the IPISS was developed, including the resource supply management system, user demand matching system, resource assessment system and expert support system. Finally, the system was applied to Wuhan University to provide IP services in the whole process for university researchers.

WHU-IPISS realizes the functions of IP resource supply, demand matching, value evaluation and expert support. It solves the IP needs of university researchers and provides a guarantee for their technology research, patent portfolio, patent transfer and patent rights protection. It also improves the efficiency of IP service and can construct the IP ecosphere in universities.

The WHU-IPISS solution resolves issues of “How to develop the university IP whole process service model, fulfilling the IP service needs for universities' researchers”. The software will be released as open-source for other universities' use. The publishing model is also useful for those universities that intend to implement the IPISS.

This paper aims to explore the contours of the future intellectual property (IP) protocol of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement.

This paper frames the IP protocol within the architecture of the AfCFTA Agreement, meaning that it will follow the structure of other protocols and will be guided by the Agreement’s foundational principles and objectives. With the place, shape and form of the protocol so established, the paper considers the substantive aspects that ought to be addressed. It also considers provisions on technical assistance, capacity building and cooperation.

The paper finds that the Tripartite Free Trade Phase 2 IP agenda is a credible starting place, which must be broadened to better meet gendered challenges and the continent’s developmental priorities. This will entail including provisions on specific aspects enumerated in the paper, which must be aligned with provisions on technical assistance, capacity building and cooperation to enhance implementation. The best outcomes in the negotiation, adoption and implementation of the IP protocol will be achieved by an inclusive approach incorporating all national, sub-regional and regional institutions guided by coherent policy and coordinated to ensure efficiency in resources and capacity mobilisation.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first paper to formally consider both the architecture and substantive provisions of the future AfCFTA IP protocol with specific focus on gendered dimensions.

International Journal of Operations and Production Management (IJOPM)'s Impact Pathway (IP) section has been launched in 2020 to host short contributions grounded in current managerial practices and/or policy development, challenging established operations and supply chain management (OSCM) knowledge and highlighting innovative and relevant research directions. This commentary reflects on the achievements of the section, delineates the key features of IP papers and stimulates further development.

This commentary provides a brief overview of the IJOPM's IP section, taking stock of the contributions that have been published so far, analysing their topics, methodologies, insights and impact.

The 19 contributions published over the last three years have dealt with a variety of emerging topics, ranging from the COVID-19 response to additive manufacturing, leveraging on key evidence from managerial practice that challenges consolidated knowledge and theory, providing clear research directions as well as managerial and/or policy guidelines.

The commentary reflects on the importance of phenomenon-driven research that seeks to bridge the gap between theory and practice, thus increasing the impact and reach of OSCM research. This is a call for contributions from scholars, business leaders and policymakers to develop further impact-oriented research.

This paper aims to present reflections and points of interest on the performance of Brazil and highlight the advances and challenges in relation to the intellectual property (IP) system; the authors highlight some scientific, economic and technological indicators on the main IP objects registered in the National Industrial Property of Brazil (INPI).

A structured literature reviews the main indicators of IP of Brazil (2013-2017), related to the scientific and economic factors more evidenced in the global scenario, with emphasis on the investment of national GDP in R&D activities, the allocation of resources from the government sector and private initiative, as in other emerging economies, such as the BRICS.

Despite Brazil’s progressive efforts to achieve greater efficiency in the public IP management system, GDP investment in R&D activities for 2019 is still below the OECD average of 2.3 per cent, and the IP indicators in the areas of patent registration, industrial designs and technology contracts have been declining.

Because of the difference between the laws of the countries on IP rights, the more incisive comparison could not be established among the emerging economies, highlighting the need for a standardization between the different international legislations.

In the scientific field, this paper allows understanding the performance of the Brazilian IP system, and the categories that require greater investments, strengthen the IP culture and stimulate integration between the international IP systems, as it is a recurrent discussion in different research studies. Originally, the paper brought together economic and scientific indicators going beyond the traditional approach that deals with IP only restricting to the quantitative of patents.

This paper aims to propose two solution approaches to determine the number of ground transport vehicles that are required to ensure the on-time delivery of military equipment between origin and destination node pairs in some geographic region, which is an important logistics problem at the US Transportation Command.

The author uses a mathematical program and a traditional heuristic to provide optimal and near-optimal solutions, respectively. The author also compares the approaches for random, small-scale problems to assess the quality and computational efficiency of the heuristic solution, and also uses the heuristic to solve a notional, large-scale problem typical of real problems.

This work helps analysts identify how many ground transport vehicles are needed to meet cargo delivery requirements in any military theater of operation.

This research assumes all problem data is deterministic, so it does not capture variations in requirements or transit times between nodes.

This work provides prescriptive details to military analysts and decision-makers in a timely manner. Prior to this work, insights for this type of problem were generated using time-consuming simulation taking about a week and often involving trial-and-error.

This research provides new methods to solve an important logistics problem. The heuristic presented in this paper was recently used to provide operational insights about ground vehicle requirements to support a geographic combatant command and to inform decisions for railcar recapitalization within the US Army.

This paper recommends new criteria for selecting seaports of embarkation during military deployments. Most importantly, this research compares the current port selection criterion, which is to select the seaport with the shortest inland transport time from the deploying installation, to the proposed port selection criteria, which are to select the seaport based on the shortest combined inland and oceanic transit time to the destination theater.

The authors construct an original integer program to select seaports that minimize the expected delivery timeline for a set of notional, but realistic, deployment requirements. The integer program is solved considering the current as well as the proposed port selection criteria. The solutions are then compared using paired-samples t-tests to assess the statistical significance of the port selection criteria.

This work suggests that the current port selection criterion results in a 10–13% slower delivery of deploying forces as compared to the proposed port selection criteria.

This work assumes deterministic inland transit times, oceanic transit times, and seaport processing rates. Operational fluctuations in transit times and processing rates are not expected to change the findings from this research.

This research provides evidence that the current port selection criterion for selecting seaports for military units deploying from the Continental United States is suboptimal. More importantly, logistics planners could use these recommended port selection criteria to reduce the expected delivery timelines during military deployments.

Several military doctrinal references suggest that planners select seaports based on habitual installation-to-port pairings, especially for early deployers. This work recommends a change to the military's current port selection process based on empirical analyses that show improvements to deployment timelines.

The purpose of this study is to assess the validity of the psychological safety (PS), psychological empowerment (PE), intrapreneurial behaviour (IB) and individual performance (IP) construct measurements originally developed in Western individualistic cultures.

Proportionate stratified systematic sampling was used among the production/operations middle managers in Nigerian medium enterprises (MEs), resulting in 355 valid responses. The measurements were analysed through internal consistency analysis, content, convergent and discriminant validity analysis.

The result shows that all four construct measurements are suitable and appropriate to gauge the respective constructs in collectivistic cultures such as Nigeria.

Cross-sectional self-reported data were used to analyse the result of this study, which may lead to common method variance.

Organizations, especially MEs, can use the validated measurements of this study to enhance work results in the Nigerian context.

Collectivistic cultures can benefit from the widely used measurements of PS, PE, IB and IP despite been originally developed in Western individualistic cultures.

This paper extends the body of knowledge by validating the measurements of PS, PE, IB and IP in collectivistic cultures such as Nigeria. Measurement validation for these constructs is scarce in this context. Thus, this study will provide a consistent and efficient reference for forthcoming studies and improve the credibility and replicability of future research results in collectivistic cultures.