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  • Legal regulation of innovativeness can spur innovation efforts
    Zirnstein, Elizabeta ; Franca, Valentina ; Ruzzier, Mitja
    The large majority of innovations protected by intellectual property in today's world are created within the framework of an employment relationship. Faced with the necessity for firms to innovate, ... there is the problem of encouragement of innovation. This paper examines whether legal regulation of innovativeness can encourage or discourage employees to innovate. In Europe, some basic rules regarding the employee inventions are stipulated already by the state anticipating to set up encouraging surroundings for creation of new ideas and findings; others are adopted by companies themselves in the forms of different internal regulations and within the frames of contractual regulation of relationships. Both set of rules try to fairy and efficiently share the benefits of employee's innovativeness. On the state level, the legislation regarding employee inventions refers mainly on three viewpoints:(1) which innovation results made by employees may be legally protected with intellectual property (IP) rights, (2) who is the owner of such results (especially if they are protectable with IP rights) and (3) if the owner is not the employed inventor, should he be rewarded for his creative endeavor. On the company level, the regulation of innovativeness in employment relationship refers mainly to the question of rewards for employee inventions. The first view (protection of employee inventions) has already been widely discussed among scholars while the empirical work regarding the regulations of ownership and rewards for innovation results made in the course of employment is rather poor. Therefore, the focus of this paper is essentially on the second view. The central issue of this paper is the effect of national and company regulation on ownership and rewards for employee inventions on innovation performance. The question in how states and companies should regulate the ownership of results of employee innovativeness and compensation system in order to encourage innovation. To answer this question, we conducted a qualitative research among Slovenian companies. The results show that companies are aware of the importance of rewards fot innovation, but approach this issue in different ways. Some companies support tighter regulations of rewards through regulations and other internal acts and agreements between them and employees or their representatives, others approach it more spontaneously. All agree thoug, that the regulation at the state level does not spur innovativeness enough.
    Source: Proceedings of the 5th European conference on innovation and entrepreneurship (Str. 707-714)
    Type of material - conference contribution ; adult, serious
    Publish date - 2010
    Language - english
    COBISS.SI-ID - 3661783

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