Innovators, Firms, and Markets

Innovators, Firms, and Markets challenges the prevailing policy consensus that robustly enforced intellectual property rights suppress competition and innovation by protecting incumbents from entry threats. Jonathan M. Barnett argues that IP rights enhance competition and innovation by enabling entry by idea-rich but capital-poor firms that may otherwise be blocked from the market. The book moves from theory to empirics through an economic history of the U.S. patent system and analysis of firms' lobbying tendencies on IP issues. Case studies of the biotechnology and semiconductor markets illustrate how patents enable entrepreneurs to play the disruptive function that is critical to successful innovation ecosystems.