Regulatory Policies and Business Strategies on Patent Protection: A General Model and Cases for the East Asian Economy

This paper proposes a general framework of patent protection which can be applied to most existing theories, and can be used to resolve various issues regarding the protection of information technology (IT)-enabled innovations, especially those involving business methods (BMs) and software. We suggest that one should consider that firms have many strategic choices or mixtures of appropriate combinations of innovations, examine different combinations of menu components rather than focusing on well-explored policies, revise market assumptions to make them more realistic and capture the complexity of policy-strategy assumptions by applying methodologies, such as experiments, system dynamics and intelligent agent theory. The work explores how these innovations are protected using the cases in the East Asian economy and find out that software and BMs are better protected in the nations that enforce strong patent rights.