The next question I asked the respondents was whether the organization had officially registered their copyright with the U.S. Copyright Office or their trademark with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Asking about the registration of intellectual property is insight into two things: that there is a desire to claim ownership and the ability to […]

I sent the survey to 107 people at the organizations curated on the theS&I 100 list, which was a list of vetted social entrepreneurs and social enterprises. The point of using this list was to highlight innovators working on social challenges, i.e. social entrepreneurs, since innovation is linked to the creation of intellectual property. I […]

Okay, my next decisions weren’t nearly life and death. But, the quality of my research choices at this point would be the difference between meaningful data and just an interesting exercise. If I was going to focus on surveying social entrepreneurs I needed to know that the definition I was using would enable me to […]

The management framework that the nonprofit sector predominately uses, New Public Management, is a bad fit. What’s needed is a framework that recognizes the strategic work of nonprofits. So, why is New Public Management a bad fit? New Public Management (NPM) is a management framework that was first adopted by public administration professionals as a […]

After all of that reading I knew more about intellectual property law and economics, theories of justice and knowledge, and the landscape of innovation. I did not know any more about intellectual property in nonprofit organizations, though. I took the new concepts to the library and did some new searches of the nonprofit literature. Everything […]

As capstones to my reading, these two texts helped to frame some key concepts that would move my nonprofit intellectual property questions forward. I was out of my comfort zone with Lessig’s The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World and Landes and Posner’s The Economic Structure of Property Law. […]

I really had no idea what reading about open innovation might be about, other than I thought it was loosely connected to the ideas of open source. Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm was as eye-opening about the mechanisms for innovation as Intellectual Property and Theories of Justice was thought-provoking. The concept of open innovation […]

A philosopher, a legal scholar, an economist, and a computer scientist walk into a bar… I don’t tell jokes because I can never remember the punchlines. Anyone who knows me well can attest. Academics in each of those disciplines edited a series of essays in one of the more unforgettable nonfiction books I’ve ever read. […]

I started my reading with Burning the Ships: Transforming Your Company’s Culture Through Intellectual Property Strategy. Marshall Phelps, also happened to be an alumnus of Muskingum University, where I was working at the time. It didn’t hurt to be able to say I’d read his book to my bosses. Frankly, the book was immensely insightful. […]

The librarians at Indiana University sent some content my way that highlighted what I had experienced working at the University of Pittsburgh. Institutions of higher education, particularly larger schools, have staff, policies, strategy, and resources specifically for the development, management, and transfer of innovation from the researcher(s) to industry. The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 transformed […]