In this chapter, which reviews some of the most recent literature about patents, we depart from the “second-best” approach that views patents as instruments solely dedicated to exclusion and to restoring appropriation. We instead present a vision of patents as structuring elements of open innovation; this is to say as instruments which help coordination between actors of the innovation process. This also leads us to focus on the problems that patents may induce for open innovation such as anti-commons, trolling (hold-up) or high transaction costs in sequential innovation. We conclude by discussing how to transform patent laws in a way that could limit these problems and thus make patents supportative of open innovation.
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