The Trouble with Innovation – Part 2

theMarketSoul decided to talk to some delegates and attendees at CeBit 2010 with respect to the problem and challenges faced by Europe in particular, regarding Innovation.

The statements made in the previous blog post did not go down well with the mixed German, Belgium and Italian (see The Trouble with Innovation - Part 1).

To recap briefly we stated that Europe did nor posses two critical factors to cradle and encourage innovation, one being a common language and two a raw capitalist model that pursued profit above all else.

With the pure profit motive there is a problem in any case and we will address this in later discussions, suffice to say we will make a distinction between profit motive and creating value.  From an economic perspective we believe strongly in the superior notion of ‘Creating Value’ over the pure profit motive and the current credit quake (Comments from a lay-economist on the credit quake 2008) has created the opportunity for us to reflect and re-evaluate our current economic models.

However, to return to our Innovation discussion the defence the Europeans put up against our controversial statements were this:

Agree with the language issue, through heavy accents, disagreed partly with the profit issues, however we had not discussed anything regarding Protectionism.

True, we hold our hands up to this accusation.

So to throw or lob stones back across the Atlantic pond to our US cousins; the States very, very fiercely protects its own market and interests.  Intellectual Property and property rights are very well developed and ingrained in the psyche of the American nation.  But the logical question to our European colleagues are this:  So why do the Americans protect their IP and Innovation so well, but we tend to give it away, losing out to both the Americans and Chinese in the process?

For this we weren’t presented with a coherent argument yet, so it is a theme we shall explore further other the next few days, whilst attending the CebIt 2010 trade exhibition.

Europe does have the framework and platform in place in order to coherently create and then enforce property and Intellectual property rights, however, integrating culture and therefore nation state laws into a single European framework is not any easy endeavour and should not be attempted without a clear focussed vision.  Therefore, we treat all the issues with kid gloves and the Lisbon Treaty and ratification processes most countries adopted does bear serious questioning and potential legal challenge.  We are not aware of any serious tests in this arena, but acknowledge our ignorance and would appreciate further clarification, should we have the wrong end of the argument in our grasp.

Therefore in conclusion of this post, we have invited two questions to be clarified:

1.       How can Europe better protect its Intellectual Property and Innovation from leaving the Greater Continental Europe?

2.       Are there any legal obstacles in the European integration project that hinders Innovation protection and enforcement of IP and other property rights?

We look forward to finding out the answers over the course of the next few days, whilst on our Continental European jaunt.

theMarketSoul ©2010