The Semiotics of Brand Manning, Paul
Annual review of anthropology,
10/2010, Volume:
39, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Approaches to the semiotics of brand are troubled by the lack of any accepted analytic definition of the phenomenon, as well as capacious, almost metaphysical, extension in which brand becomes ...identified with semiosis as such, and thus everything is a brand. In addition, studies of brand tend to focus on highly visible or successful brands, as often as not as a proxy for a real object of analytic interest that lies elsewhere. Brand discourse defines brand in opposition to the material properties of the product, leading to a dematerialization of brand, which erases the messy materialities, contingencies, and hybrids that continually arise in the material semiosis of brand. Rather than attempt a definition of brand, the recent literature on brand semiotics is explored along several material and semiotic dimensions of the variousness of its relationship to its universes of circulation and in different professional discourse and historical and cultural contexts.
Given the ever-increasing pace and complexity of technological innovation in the energy sector, monitoring technological changes has become of strategic importance. One of the most common techniques ...for technology monitoring is patent analysis, which enables the identification of technological trends over time. However, few previous studies have carried out patent analysis in the energy sector. This study aims to explore patterns of innovation and of evolution in energy technologies, particularly focusing on similarities and differences across technologies. For this purpose, we first defined the relevant energy technologies and extracted the associated patent data from the United States Patents and Trademark Office (USPTO) and then adopted six patent indices and developed six patent maps to analyze their innovation characteristics. We then clustered energy technologies with similar characteristics, so defining innovation categories, and analyzed the changes in these characteristics over time to define their evolution categories. As one of the few attempts to investigate the overall trends in the energy sector's innovation and evolution, this study is expected to help develop an in-depth understanding of the energy industry, which will be useful in establishing technology strategies and policy in this rapidly changing sector.
•We examined the patterns of innovation and evolution of energy technologies.•Six types of innovation patterns such as “competitive” or “mature” were identified.•Six types of evolution patterns such as “towards closed innovation” were identified.•The patterns of evolution were related to the patterns of innovation.
Aiming at the high cost of data labeling and ignoring the internal relevance of features in existing trademark retrieval methods, this paper proposes an unsupervised trademark retrieval method based ...on attention mechanism. In the proposed method, the instance discrimination framework is adopted and a lightweight attention mechanism is introduced to allocate a more reasonable learning weight to key features. With an unsupervised way, this proposed method can obtain good feature representation of trademarks and improve the performance of trademark retrieval. Extensive comparative experiments on the METU trademark dataset are conducted. The experimental results show that the proposed method is significantly better than traditional trademark retrieval methods and most existing supervised learning methods. The proposed method obtained a smaller value of NAR (Normalized Average Rank) at 0.051, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method in trademark retrieval.
Post-market monitoring European Union - The EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has approved the registration of the name "EU PAS Register" as a European Union trade mark. The trade mark will ...reinforce the EMA's legal control over the name of the platform and its content. * EMA News, 7 August 2017.
The present paper investigates the relationship between the involvement of family firms in R&D collaborations aimed at developing green solutions and the value of resulting innovations. To dig into ...this relationship, the moderating effects of two proximity dimensions (i.e., geographical distance and technological relatedness) are also assessed. Analyses are based on a sample of 156 joint patents classified into the “Alternative energy production” field, as defined by the International Patent Classification Green Inventory and successfully filed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office in the period 1997–2010 by publicly listed companies. According to our conjectures, results reveal a positive relationship between the involvement of family firms and green innovation value. Moreover, our findings show that this relationship is hindered when partners are geographically distant or technologically proximate. Eventually, we contribute to the literature on green innovation by unveiling under which conditions inter‐firm R&D collaborations lead to more valuable innovations.
In the original article 1, the terms 'osISET' and 'ISET' within the 'CTC capture' sub-section of the Materials and Methods section have both been replaced with 'CTCBIOPSYR'.
It has been argued that platform technology owners cocreate business value with other firms in their platform ecosystems by encouraging complementary invention and exploiting indirect network ...effects. In this study, we examine whether participation in an ecosystem partnership improves the business performance of small independent software vendors (ISVs) in the enterprise software industry and how appropriability mechanisms influence the benefits of partnership. By analyzing the partnering activities and performance indicators of a sample of 1,210 small ISVs over the period 1996-2004, we find that joining a major platform owner ' s platform ecosystem is associated with an increase in sales and a greater likelihood of issuing an initial public offering (IPO). In addition, we show that these impacts are greater when ISVs have greater intellectual property rights or stronger downstream capabilities. This research highlights the value of interoperability between software products, and stresses that value cocreation and appropriation are not mutually exclusive strategies in interfirm collaboration.
We survey the economic literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the choice of intellectual property protection by firms. Our focus is on the trade-offs between using patents and disclosing ...versus the use of secrecy, although we also look briefly at the use of other means of formal intellectual property protection.