Innovation Incentives Quotes

We have this highly irrational system of incentivizing innovation for clean and green technologies, where we allow the innovator to have a temporary monopoly and then mark up the price of the product or sell licenses at high prices to those who want to use the kind of product that the innovator has invented. This system is collectively irrational because many people, to avoid the inflated prices of still-patented cleaner and greener technologies, opt for some older technology that is much more polluting.

Both humanity's capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.

You grow great crops in great soil. And the soil is the commons. Increasingly, we have monopolistic companies that try to take as much as they can for themselves. And we have a patent and copyright regime that makes sure that nothing goes back into the commons unless by an extraordinary act of generosity. This is not fertile soil for innovation.

Instead of fostering investment and innovation through deregulation, the FCC will be devoting its resources to adopting new rules without any evidence that consumers are unable to access the content of their choice.

I decry the current tendency to seek patents on algorithms. There are better ways to earn a living than to prevent other people from making use of one's contributions to computer science.

While I support granting drug companies patents to recover their investment and encourage innovation, companies that take advantage of this goodwill to build a monopoly must be stopped.

Government is the ultimate monopoly. And monopolies, as any economist will tell you, often breed complacency and a lack of innovation.

The genius of capitalism lies in its ability to make self-interest serve the wider interest. The potential of a big financial return for innovation unleashes a broad set of talented people in pursuit of many different discoveries. This system, driven by self-interest, is responsible for the incredible innovations that have improved so many lives.

Millions of people toil in the shadow of the law we make, and much of their livelihood is made possible by the existence of intellectual property rights.

By taxing CO2, firms and households would have an incentive to retrofit for the world of the future. The tax would also provide firms with incentives to innovate in ways that reduce energy usage and emissions - giving them a dynamic competitive advantage.

The United States owes a great debt to its inventors. Far from being grateful to them, it places every obstruction in their way and makes it enormously difficult to secure a patent.

Capitalism gives all of us a great opportunity if we seize it with both hands and hang on to it.

Consumer technology and medical tools have been created to benefit our daily lives. Without self-regulation, though, the industry could be at risk of potentially halting years of innovation and stunting growth in this field.

For one thing, there are many "inventions" that are not patentable. The "inventor" of the supermarket, for example, conferred great benefits on his fellowmen for which he could not charge them. Insofar as the same kind of ability is required for the one kind of invention as for the other, the existence of patents tends to divert activity to patentable inventions.

I'm in favor of inequality if it comes about from people making great innovations that make us all better off. And I think those people deserve to be rich. But the people who get rich by lobbying the Congress to give them special protections that come out of the hides of the workers seems to be a bad idea.

Faced with the profound changes that AI technologies can produce, pressure for "more" and "tougher" regulation is inevitable. Misunderstanding about what AI is and is not, especially against a background of scare-mongering, could fuel opposition to technologies that could benefit everyone. This would be a tragic mistake. Regulation that stifles innovation, or relocates it to other jurisdictions, would be similarly counterproductive.

support … continued widespread innovation by resisting the wider application of patents

As I noted in my Nobel lecture, an early insight in my work on the economics of information concerned the problem of appropriability - the difficulty that those who pay for information have in getting returns.

In an industry with highly sequential innovation, it may be better for society to scrap patents altogether than try to tighten them.

This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth.

One of the big concerns I have is that most of the HR departments in a lot of companies are hiring away from creativity and they don't know it. For instance, they are requiring everybody to have a college degree. The most creative people I know couldn't deal with college.

I mean, how would you like to be fighting coronavirus in a socialist health care environment? A socialist system in which the manufacturers and creators of a vaccine would not be rewarded for their efforts? You think there'd be the same race to find a vaccine? No.

Next came the Patent laws. These began in England in 1624; and, in this country, with the adoption of our constitution. Before then [these?], any man might instantly use what another had invented; so that the inventor had no special advantage from his own invention. The patent system changed this; secured to the inventor, for a limited time, the exclusive use of his invention; and thereby added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.

America can no longer afford to get the Nobel Prizes while our competitors get the profits.

If people don't get paid for their inventions, that's not a good thing. In the case of many patents, there are people who aren't in a position to take them to the next level. If you don't enforce your rights, no one is going to enforce them for you.