User and Open Innovation: How Should Intellectual Property Law Respond?

The NYU’s Engelberg Center and the UC Berkeley Center for Law & Technology co-sponsored a workshop to consider the implications of user and open innovation for intellectual property doctrine. The importance of these creative paradigms relative to centralized innovation by manufacturers and mass media producers is increasingly recognized in the business community, yet has not been systematically addressed by intellectual property law. The workshop brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars of law, management, and economics to consider whether and in what specific ways intellectual property law should be modified to accommodate the increasing importance of innovation by users for their own use and of collaborative and open processes of innovation.