Intellectual Property Strategies and Sustainable Business Models for Sustainability Transitions

Dear Colleagues,

Increasing global climate, resource and biodiversity challenges coupled with growing social issues raise the need to accelerate sustainability transitions. Sustainability transitions rely on complex, cumulative and open innovation processes typically stretching over long periods of time. These involve multiple organizations across innovation ecosystems, value networks or industries often involving more developed and emerging countries. Accordingly, a shift to sustainable manufacturing and consumption is only possible as a concerted effort.

With new knowledge typically being at the core of sustainable technologies and related business models, the adequate usage of intellectual property (IP) is an imperative for unlocking innovation and accelerating diffusion processes, thereby facilitating sustainability transitions on a global scale.

The role of IP in effective sustainability transitions however remains insufficiently understood. Its role needs critical examination on different levels in the light of emerging sustainable, circular and sharing business models. Moreover, comparing legal IP frameworks between more developed and emerging economies can provide valuable learnings on how IP can be used to support sustainability transitions.

Given the lack of knowledge and research that brings together both the role of IP and new sustainable business models in sustainability transitions, we invite contributions from the management, sustainability, law and interdisciplinary sciences, with a strong emphasis on innovation. Examples of contributions may focus on licensing frameworks for sustainable business models, IP sharing models for green innovation diffusion, IP strategies for product-service systems, open IP models supporting diffusion of social business models, the impact of free licensing/patent pledges on the adoption of sustainable technologies, patenting challenges for remanufacturing firms, approaches for sustainable value creation through technology transfer, or analysis of legal instruments and science-technology policies to support sustainability transitions.

Contributions can be conceptual, theoretical or empirical and should adopt organizational, inter-organizational (e.g. cooperation) or intra-organizational (e.g. projects, teams) level perspectives with focus on formal or informal IP strategies. We particularly invite contributions that focus on or are authored by colleagues from countries that receive official development assistance (ODA countries). Comparative studies are particularly welcome [http://www.oecd.org/dac/financing-sustainable-development/development-finance-standards/daclist.htm].

This special issue is jointly edited by partners from Belmont Forum funded research project ‘Intellectual Property Models for Accelerating Sustainability Transitions’ (IPACST) [ www.ip4sustainability.org].

Guest Editors

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• intellectual property strategies
• formal (registered, unregistered) and informal IP (know-how, trade secrets, data, algorithms)
• licensing approaches and frameworks
• legal intellectual property instruments
• science-technology policies for IP
• innovation adoption and diffusion
• sustainability transitions
• green technologies
• circular economy and sustainable business models/product-service systems
• social/green business models
• sustainable development goals (SDGs)