Many times we blogged about the need for Europe and its old school thinking politicians how to use the vast innovative potential within companies (and not least SME’s) with highly skilled entrepreneurial spirit to drag us out of recession. New thinking is necessary, not stimulating old school industries, public projects and the like, but give more room to innovative thinkers and entrepreneurs
China, and other Asian countries will not sit on their hands while developing innovative high tech industries to fight recession and to keep up economic activity and demand. A very exemplary situation is the approval and backing Korea and China gave to an initiative to set up a new joint development project in Korea (KCIID) where Chinese companies are provided by Korean and Chinese governments with land, knowledge, tech transfer facilities as well as financial support to produce innovative products and services for the years to come. To enable those companies to effectively compete and not being held up by insurmountable IP issues in their export markets, the KCIID develops and acquires existing IP (and provides licenses to its development project members) to support the development work. That’s the plan. So, the level of sophistication in Asian development projects like these reaches out to IP as a vital part of any innovation strategy.
What in contrast does Europe do if it comes to acknowledging that IP has a vital role to play? Well, if it comes to IP, sad to say, very little except fro politicians to let their ears hang to open source proponents who’s continuous discussions about quality of intellectual property clouds a clear view on what really would help their innovative constituency to produce economic growth and recession proof strategies: IP.
So let me give an example. We blogged before on the rather odd situation that Netherlands possesses the majority of the world’s water technology and knowledge but is unable to translate that into an equivalent market share in that same technology. How come we cannot “translate” a major advantage we have on water management in Europe into hard cash? Because many lack the vision on how to use this entrepreneurial advantage in a way that would bring Netherlands, and hence Europe hard cash in the form of licenses paid .Maybe we also have to admit that we can learn from China and other Asian countries, rather then lecture them on how to solve their problems