Innovation, Creativity and Law

Book excerpt: This book develops the theme of my earlier Innovation: The Creative Impulse in Human Progress, and considerably expands the latter book. I came to the study of innovation from experience in industry which had brought me into close practical contact with it, and my initial interest in the subject was in terms of the way in which it expressed human creativity. Progressively, however, my focus shifted towards the laws which help or hinder creativeness in being economically fruitful. This led to the writing of The Political Economy of Innovation and the editing of Direct Protection of Innovation. In the latter work, I had the opportunity of arguing the case for specific new law to complement the Patent system, and of having that case criticised by experts. Just as the first book set economic innovation in a wider context of creativity, the present one sets the law that makes it possible in a wider context of property rights. This is because my study of intellectual property resulted in growing awareness of the incomparable past value and even greater future potential of these rights for innovation and prosperity. My intellectual debt to Douglass North is as great in this later stage as it was to Joseph Schumpeter in the earlier one, and to Christopher Dawson, by whom I had the good fortune to be taught in person, in both.