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"The common Western narrative of China is of a country whose businesses unfairly compete by stealing intellectual property from others and making money off of copycat technology. While undoubtedly a large amount of IP theft does happen in China, its hard to believe that anyone can look at China and not see innovation everywhere. I've noticed that this question of innovation in China comes up often among Western observers of China. Why? Do we feel that the playing field is unfair? Are we in the U.S. desperately looking for signs of an enduring competitive advantage even as we've shipped our entire manufacturing base overseas? I'm not sure, but the topic sure comes up a lot. Yes, China can innovate, but what kind of innovation? Jacob Hsu (Symbio) remarked that in Silicon Valley, investors and entrepreneurs are looking for "business model" innovation, which I interpreted to mean a new product that creates new markets. He characterized Chinese innovation as mostly incremental "technology" innovation in the past, but that increasing we were seeing highly innovative companies emerge, such as Tencent. He also highlighted the phenomenon of "shanzhai" as an example of innovation on a much smaller scale. The "shanzhai" consumer electronics economy in China is rapidly creating next generation connected devices out of laptop and mobile phone components, and that in most cases the minimum scale required to produce these units can be as small as a few hundred units to make money. Conventional wisdom equates intellectual property protection with innovation. But the "shanzhai" phenomenon challenges this idea. Could the lack of intellectual property protection create opportunities to remix, modify and mashup existing technology that creates an "innovation capability" for China's entrepreneurs even as the lack of IP protection prevents them from fully capitalizing on their successes (because the next guy will just rip them off)? In this

"Oded Shenkar, Professor of Business at Ohio State University, has written widely on the Chinese economy, notably in his acclaimed book "The Chinese Century" (2004). He has argued that China has been one of the main drivers and a primary beneficiary of the emergence of a 'copycat economy', where imitators increasingly win over innovators in capturing economic value. It's a subject he explores further in his new book, "Copycats: How Smart Companies Use Imitation to Gain Strategic Edge" (Harvard Business Press). In this talk, he will discuss whether Chinese businesses will, in the coming years, succeed in adding innovation to their repertoire, and whether this could result in a hybrid imitation/ innovation formula which will enable them to trump the competitive advantage of the world's major multinationals - or whether these multinationals will respond by learning the art of imitation themselves. Edwin Chan of the Harvard Design School and Tony Chen of Jones Day in Shanghai will also join in the debate on innovation and imitation in China. Moderated by Russell Flannery, Shanghai Bureau Chief of Forbes magazine."

And the R&D money is not generating a commensurate volume of new patents. Taiwan manages five times as many a year and Japan 30 times. Most significantly, China isn't commercializing its inventions, a result of top-down-driven allocations of R&D money, not naturally innovative state-owned companies and a lack of a system of venture funding.

"Over the past years, various Member States have repeatedly requested that WIPO become inclusive of all methodologies to foster innovation, including Copyright, Patents, Free Software and Open Innovation Models. Many Member States successfully employ a wider mix of methodologies on a national level already, such as Germany, which as part of its response to the financial crisis decided to invest 500m EUR into the focus areas Green IT, IT-Security and Free Software. Other examples exist from various Member States around the world, spanning all regional groups."

"Wine, private jets, insurance policies, premium coffee and high-speed Internet service, even technology consulting, are just a few examples of the market niches that have been hit by lower prices in recent years because of widespread imitation and competition. That may be good news for consumers, but not for the small businesses that invested time and resources to create products and build markets. To survive and thrive, a small business has to learn to constantly innovate in every area, from back-shop operations to products to distribution, says management consultant Oren Harari. His book "Break From the Pack: How to Compete in a Copycat Economy," to be published in September by Wharton Publishing/Prentice Hall, is packed with advice for small businesses."

Spammers have already written software able to match humans at some CAPTCHAs. But when CAPTCHAs finally fail, their co-creator Luis von Ahn at Carnegie Mellon University says there will be reason for celebration as well as concern. Software that can solve any text-based CAPTCHA will be as much a milestone for artificial intelligence as it will be a problem for online security.

Using open source software was about "better and more effective government". He criticised government IT procurement for lacking "open standards" and making it difficult for small companies to get the contracts. "All too often a government IT system is incompatible with other types of software, which stifles competition and hampers innovation. "Looking at the litany of IT projects that have collapsed or spiralled over budget, it's clear too that this has meant billions of pounds wasted and public service reform being hampered," Mr Osborne said. "The government's approach needs to be overhauled."

EFF's Teaching Copyright curriculum was created to help teachers present the laws surrounding digital rights in a balanced way. Teaching Copyright provides lessons and ideas for opening your classroom up to discussion, letting your students express their ideas and concerns, and then guiding your students toward an understanding of the boundaries of copyright law. In five distinct lessons, students are challenged to: * Reflect on what they already know about copyright law. * See the connection between the history of innovation and the history of copyright law. * Learn about fair use, free speech, and the public domain and how those concepts relate to using materials created by others. * Experience various stakeholders' interests and master the principles of fair use through a mock trial. Teaching Copyright will require your students to think about their role in the online world and provide them with the legal framework they need to make informed choices about their online behavior.

Researchers at Princeton's Center for IT Policy have released a new paper urging federal agencies to focus on improving the availability of raw government data rather than building better user-facing web sites. They predict that if the data is made available in a structured format, private parties will develop innovative sites to view and manipulate it.

Recently, countries from China and Brazil to Malaysia and South Africa have passed laws promoting the patenting of publicly funded research [1,2], and a similar proposal is under legislative consideration in India [3]. These initiatives are modeled in part on the United States Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 [4]. Bayh-Dole (BD) encouraged American universities to acquire patents on inventions resulting from government-funded research and to issue exclusive licenses to private firms [5,6], on the assumption that exclusive licensing creates incentives to commercialize these inventions. A broader hope of BD, and the initiatives emulating it, was that patenting and licensing of public sector research would spur science-based economic growth as well as national competitiveness [6,7]. And while it was not an explicit goal of BD, some of the emulation initiatives also aim to generate revenues for public sector research institutions [8]. We believe government-supported research should be managed in the public interest. We also believe that some of the claims favoring BD-type initiatives overstate the Act's contributions to growth in US innovation. Important concerns and safeguards-learned from nearly 30 years of experience in the US-have been largely overlooked. Furthermore, both patent law and science have changed considerably since BD was adopted in 1980 [9,10]. Other countries seeking to emulate that legislation need to consider this new context.

"What does all this mean for Americans? It is easy to be annoyed at cheap and shoddy copycat products pouring out of China. The Brits in their time were very annoyed at upstart Yankee copycats and tried to protect their own knowhow from imitators. It didn't work then and it will certainly not work now. The only realistic course of action is to keep markets open and not try to block Chinese catch-up."

"First of all, keep in mind that it's not only stickers-or, for that matter, PCs and dishwashers and insurance policies and designer coffee-that become commodities. Every organization faces the challenge. IBM is discovering that even its traditional discrete consulting services are slowly becoming commoditized, a term IBM itself uses. Companies like Wipro-based in Bangalore, India-are replicating some of IBM's consultative offerings at much lower prices, which is why, to IBM's chagrin, companies like Louis Vuitton and Target are turning to Wipro for basic information technology and data-management expertise."

"This paper investigates the conditions of the manufacture of low-cost technology in China with the examples of 'pirated' VCD players, 'no-name' DVD players, and Shenzhen's development as a techno-urban city. It emphasizes the significance of the cultural logic of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and argues that the various transformations and deflections that are derived from ubiquitous OEM experiences have gone beyond the original model of an authorized OEM, experiences that are to some extent embodied in the transgression of brand name and patent hegemonies, which are mainly controlled by high technology companies. OEMs have been associated with China's current imperative and uninhibited development of low-cost technology capitalism. 'Made in China' signifies the production of any product, legal or illegal, for transnational high technology giants or domestic technology manufacturers. Learning to 'become an OEM' in China has partly resulted in excessive technological mimesis that may be part of an unauthorized, underground economy that is based on low-cost technology. Based on the Shenzhen experience, part of this study will show industrial production-oriented OEM cultures in which illegal operations and counterfeit trade are incorporated, even in city projects that are shared by municipal governments and Chinese technological companies, and undergo spatial restructuring in the development of the economy, consumerism, and urbanism. "