In the 2010 Guglielmo Marconi Lecture given by Commissioner Geoghegan-Quinn at the “Innovation Summit of the Lisbon Council” on March 5th, we can hear the thinking of the new Research Commissioner pushing, as one might expect, to have more problems solved at a European and global level.

At See e.g. 4:30 ff it becomes most relevant to questions of the patent system, with the following messages:

• We must build a fully functional single market for innovation; that means
  • tearing down the barriers to cross-border trade & services and the cross-border provision of venture capital
  • finally finding an agreement on the community patent
• more than this we need to take a fresh look at our entire intellectual property framework
  • indeed we need to ask ourselves some pretty profound questions about how to best foster innovation in the early 21st century
  • may be by fostering the growing trend toward greater openness?
    • however ….
    • we will have to get the balance right
  • Her final sentence fits better with the spirit of the “Wikinomics” talk heard at the same summit than with that of the patent system:

    We are all innovators now - and the task ahead is to build, not just the “i-conomy”, but a cohesive and prosperous “i-society.”

In this context her call for the community patent could be interpreted as lip service to an eternal issue that may have become outdated meanwhile, reminiscent also of what her colleague Barnier said a few weeks earlier:

“I can tell you frankly, I really hope I’ll be the last Commissioner who tries to finalise a deal on the European patent.”

At 7:20 she stresses that R&D efforts must driven by global private networks and the role of European governments and the EU must exercise utter restraint when getting involved and make sure that they make up for market failures in a market-neutral way only.

The patent system is ideally intended to be a system that makes up for market failures in a market-neutral way. This is perhaps its single most important advantage compared to alternative systems with heavier emphasis on prizes and public research that have been discussed by economists in recent years.

Resources

• Commission: Towards an ‘i-conomy’ - Commissioner. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn delivers the. 2010 Guglielmo Marconi lecture
• Montesquieu Institute: Commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn delivers the 2010 Guglielmo Marconi lecture at the Lisbon Council’s innovation summit Innovation Summit of the Lisbon Council Brussels, 5th March 2010
• Europarl 2010-01-14:Wednesday’s round-up: Andor, Barnier, Geoghegan-Quinn, Potočnik
• NEW COMMISSION/RESEARCH : ireland’s geoghegan-quinn makes “good impression”
• Anthony D. Williams: Wikinomics and the Era of Openness: European Innovation at the Crossroads
  • Full Report by the same author
  • “Europe should require 80% of all publicly funded research to be available in open source journals after a short, six-month embargo under the Eighth Framework Programme, which is due to be adopted in 2014. Contrary to some claims, this step would open scientific knowledge up to greater scrutiny, wider distribution and better commercial and social applications.”