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Firms are keenly aware of trade secrets’ importance. According to survey evidence from the United States and other developed countries, large and small firms in a wide variety of industry sectors are more likely to rate trade secrets as “very important” than all other types of IP protection. In practice, trade secrets have several identified advantages over other types of IP protection. First, they are broad in scope, covering virtually any type of commercially valuable information that has been subject to reasonable measures to protect secrecy. They are also a “do- it-yourself” IP right; firms can use internal measures (such as contracts and security procedures) to maintain protections from inception rather than waiting for the government review and approval required for patents and trademarks. Trade secret protections are flexible as well—for example, firms need not file a new application to cover modifications to a trade secret, they simply incorporate them into their existing protections.

From a societal standpoint, trade secrets also can be considered “innovation friendly.” They can be shared with employees and commercial partners, so long as firms protect their trade secrets with contracts or other reasonable measures. Moreover, U.S. trade secret laws generally permit independent discovery, reverse engineering, and other fair practices considered critical to innovation. Liability for trade secret misappropriation is generally limited to cases of wrongful conduct or violation of honest commercial practices. For these reasons and others, a large portion of U.S. IP exports consist of trade-secret-reliant industrial processes and software licensed to affiliates and third parties abroad.

U.S. observers have long complained that Chinese firms steal intellectual property (IP) from American companies, universities, and research institutions.¹ Most of these  stress that the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) directs this theft. Other  focus on military applications of the theft. Both arguments are true, but presume that the problem’s ultimate source is policy. It is not. The fundamental source of the problem is China’s political system. The current Chinese political, legal, economic, and business structure disincentivizes innovation in favor of acquisition and imitation both domestically and internationally. IP theft is not simply a longstanding Chinese government policy; it is an inherent feature of the Chinese Party-State-Economy. Therefore, addressing the problem is far more challenging than most American policy makers and business leaders understand. This essay is for anyone who wants to defend U.S. IP from theft. My intention is to help Americans understand the origins, character, and scope of the threat, as well as some possible mitigations. Sadly, no comprehensive, effective, short-term solution exists.

The patent process involves several steps that each contain inherent risk. From initial documentation to legal consultations and applying for a patent, each step involves the transfer of proprietary information that can be intercepted or mishandled. For companies pioneering new technologies in highly competitive markets, even the disclosure of 'unimportant' details can lead to significant strategic losses. For example, seemingly innocuous information may help competitors infer a company’s research direction and technological capabilities. 

By necessity, the patent application process involves disclosing proprietary information, often in the form of internal patent disclosures. These documents establish the novelty and scope of an invention and are often shared freely inside an organization and with third parties, such as patent lawyers. This can result in multiple copies of sensitive information existing in the enterprise in email, on laptops and mobile end point or in cloud repositories.

Therefore, for innovations that can be kept secret and are expected to protect a source of value extending beyond 20 years, trade secrets represent a valuable means of protection. However, the risk is that an incidental disclosure will result in the trade secret becoming publicly known, with no other rights available to ensure exclusivity.

In addition to providing certainty of term, once a patent has been filed, your innovation can be disclosed without impacting patentability. This provides freedom to disclose the invention in investment discussions and to potential partners. In the biofuels sector, for example, innovators routinely collaborate with other innovators such as universities and energy companies, so the ability to openly discuss an innovation has great commercial value.

For pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), patent thickets are anti-competitive and obstruct the ability to negotiate for savings, which ultimately means patients are not paying the lowest cost possible for medications. We’ve said this before because it’s very important: the key to lower prescription drug costs is adequate competition in the marketplace.

For brand drugs, the ability of PBMs to lower drug costs hinges on the availability of sufficient alternatives, which creates negotiating leverage through competition. Once drug manufacturers set drug prices, PBMs negotiate with those manufacturers for rebates, which are a key tool in helping to reduce prescription drug costs for consumers. Rebates reduce the overall costs for prescription drugs, thereby generating in savings every year. If there is no competitor on the market for a drug, PBMs lack the leverage to negotiate rebates on brand drugs.

Biotechnology firms have the potential to change the face of the health care industry forever. These firms and their ideas could revolutionize patient care and amass significant profits; that’s why it’s important to take steps to protect the ideas, research and technologies that contribute to breakthroughs. Discover four reasons why patents matter in the biotech sector:

Biotechnology is perhaps one of the most research-intensive industries. Companies in this sector typically invest between 40 and 50 percent of their revenues in research and development, compared to 13 percent in pharmaceuticals and 5 percent in the chemical industry. The people who manage biotechnology firms must protect the results of the research, and securing patents is the most effective way to do so.

The idea of a “thicket” or “anticommons” in the software industry is difficult to credit.  When raised in my interviews, that thesis universally was rejected. The basic premise of the model is that assets will go unused because of the costs of obtaining the permissions necessary to use them.263 As discussed above, there is nothing theoretically impossible about that outcome. The important question, however, is whether this is in fact what has happened in the software industry. In this case, a few objective indicators suggest reasons why the thesis of the patent thicket has so little power to say anything usefully descriptive about the industry. For one thing, none of the startup firms to which I spoke suggested a practice of doing prior-art searches before beginning development of their products. As far as I can tell, the only occasion in the software industry in which a startup is likely to experience such costs is when the startup is founded on a specific piece of existing technology spun off from an existing company or from a university laboratory. For another thing, no investor suggested any concern about the possibility that their portfolio firms might be infringing the IP of others in the industry. That is not because they were sure that the startups were not infringing; it was because they thought it would be unlikely to pose a significant difficulty if they were. As discussed above, industry executives do accept one premise of the patent-thicket thesis: that software patents are multiplying so rapidly that it is likely that many products startups are developing ultimately will infringe patents held by large existing companies. The textbook example is IBM, which apparently holds far more software patents than any other company in the industry. Indeed, as I explained above several of my interview subjects joked that they thought it likely – without any investigation or particular knowledge – that there would be something in IBM’s portfolio that their product infringed.

Finally, we argue that the intensity of the current policy debate on patent thickets is misplaced. Some scholars suggest that the rise of the high-technology industry has overburdened the patent system and caused a systematic failure. There are a number of economic circumstances that could, individually or in concert, cause such a failure, at least in theory. But there are also private and institutional arrangements that avert such a failure in practice. At present we have to say that the sky is not falling: All of the economic circumstances leading to patent thickets can only occur when an economy has rapid invention delivering substantial commercial benefits – this is a good economic problem that should be kept in its proper perspective.

China systematically extracts advanced technology from the West. It does so legally, by mining open source databases, investing in our most advanced companies, and compelling technology transfer as a condition for doing business in China, as well as illicitly, through cybertheft and industrial espionage. How we choose to react will define whether the United States continues to lead in—and reap the benefits of—technical innovation and whether we will be able to set the global norms and standards for technology development and use. Previous U.S. presidents of both parties engaged China in dialogue on IP theft and market access for U.S. firms, among other issues. They were unable to correct China’s behavior. So far, the Trump Administration has focused on trade negotiations and on “defensive” measures: from Congress reforming CFIUS in 2018 and a proposed tightening of export controls, to scrutinizing and slowing cross-border collaboration, and discussing restricting Chinese student visas to the United States. i Yet instead of closing the U.S. system, as we are beginning to do, we can and must compete with China, and in some cases, find ways to collaborate. Defense is important but it alone will not solve the problem. While the government is erecting barriers to cross-border trade, investment and knowledge flows, U.S. technology companies see the world as mostly global, integrated and stateless. These companies innovate globally 1 Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of Stanford University, the Geopolitics, Technology and Governance Program, or the Technology and Public Policy Project. Cyber Policy Center Geopolitics, Technology, and Governance 2 The Technology and Public Policy Project | Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and cooperate across borders, and they do not necessarily share the government’s view that U.S. national security is at stake, and that ending collaboration is the best way to protect it. This paper is designed to give the administration, Congress and/or the incoming President a firm grasp on the tools that are available to win the technology race with China. It proposes a three-prong approach to addressing China’s rise—contest, compete, and collaborate—with concrete recommended policy actions under each prong. We support continued engagement with China; that engagement cannot succeed if China pays no costs for bad behavior. We outline a narrowly tailored set of defensive measures below. Offensively, we must augment the U.S. innovation system so that we can compete with China or any other challenger nation. We propose doing so via substantially increased investment in talent and R&D, and in diplomacy to proactively set the international norms and standards that govern technology development. Finally, where possible, we should collaborate with China on technologies—such as clean tech and specific healthcare technologies—that do not implicate U.S. national security and where technical advancements would help humanity as a whole. The Challenge What’s at stake? There is nothing wrong with China’s desire to grow, and in fact, the U.S. and its allies should welcome the contributions China can make to future technological innovations. But China does not play fair. Chinese mercantilism undermines the norms and basic trust that support the global economic order. If the United States does not act, we risk ceding technological leadership and influence to set the norms, values and standards for technology, with three potentially disastrous consequences.

There are several important factors which affect the incidence of foreign investment. The size of the local market, valuation factors, geography, bilateral trade and regulatory regime are all important factors that affect a multinational company’s decision to invest abroad (see, e.g., Erel et al. (2012), and Alfaro (2017)). Another important determinant is the degree of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in the host economy. Stronger protection can entice foreign investment by lowering the risk of having the investors’ intellectual property misappropriated (Maskus (2000), Javorcik (2004), Branstetter et al. (2006), Ivus et al. (2016, 2017), and Noon et al. (2019)). Contrary to the conventional wisdom, in this paper we document that there is a small, negative impact of an important aspect of IPR – trade secrets protection – on the overall incidence of inbound FDI across U.S. states. We also show that such protection has, in fact, contrasting effects on the main modes of establishment entry. While trade secrets protection has a large positive effect on the incidence of greenfield projects, it surprisingly has a large negative impact on the incidence of cross-border M&A deals.

The United States is the world’s second largest agricultural trader, behind the European Union. U.S. agricultural exports and imports increased significantly over the last 25 years due to the economic ascension of many emerging economies, as well as the implementation of foreign and domestic policies that expanded U.S. access to foreign markets. Over the same period, the geographic and product composition of U.S. agricultural trade shifted, as rising incomes and growing supply capacity of emerging economies reshaped global supply and demand for agricultural and food products (see publication below).

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, some researchers assumed that the global spread of democracy would end the era of revolutions (; ; , , ; ; ; ). According to Sanderson, who in turn draws on the work of Goodwin (, ), “revolutions [are] unlikely in years ahead primarily because of the wave of democratization that has swept over much of the less-developed world in the past two decades… Why should democratization reduce the probability of revolution? For one thing, it ameliorates (even if it does not eliminate) social conflict, and it institutionalizes that conflict by redirecting it into socially legitimate channels. If people are unhappy with their rulers, they recognize that they have an opportunity to get rid of them in the next election. Democratic regimes of government also provide people with the opportunity to engage in popular protests that often allow them to win concessions from economic and political elites. Goodwin’s conclusion is that “the ballot box has been the coffin of revolutionaries” (2003, p. 67). Indeed, the evidence gives strong support to this view. As Goodwin notes, no revolution has ever overthrown a democratic regime” (, p. 201).

However, as almost two decades have passed after Goodwin’s papers, the world has seen several democratically elected rulers overthrown by revolutions. The most notable example is the Ukrainian Revolution of 2013–2014, which toppled the democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych well before the end of his presidential term. The revolution of June 30, 2013 in Egypt, which overthrew (with the assistance of the Egyptian military) the democratically elected Mohamed Morsi is another notable case. The revolution in Armenia in 2018 can also be considered here as a solid example (; , ; ). What is the explanation behind this discrepancy between theory and observation?

Plastic pollution predominantly originates from suburban and urban areas, with a significant portion finding its way into lakes, rivers, oceans, and seas. MPs carry several toxic elements (DDT, Hexachlorobenzene) that toxify the water bodies and are transferred along with the food web which harms marine biota and final consumers (humans). Dietary exposure to MPs for a long period may change the chromosomal sequences in humans and finally may lead to cancer, obesity, and infertility (Laskar and Kumar, 2019). Cosmetics, hand cleansers, face wash, toothpaste, and dental care products contain PE MPs particles (Sharma and Chatterjee, 2017), and use of these day-to-day products may cause savior health hazards including skin damage as tissue may absorb these particles. The government should set zero tolerance for plastics and must take strict actions against the use of plastics and implementation of laws and penalties by the local government to minimize plastic pollution from the environment. The government should force industries to stop the production of conventional non-degradable plastics and promote and introduce bio-degradable plastics in the market at the minimum possible price. Education regarding environmental health and mass public awareness is very significant because the result of pollution management strategies directly depends on people's behavior.

Obviously, pollution did not respect geographical boundaries. Pollutants can transfer from one soil to another through wind blows or water runoff among other carriers. Soil pollution is associated mainly with human activities such as urbanization, agricultural, and industrial developments. For example, in the adjacent surrounding urban areas, continuous disposing of untreated wastewater into the soil is an obvious example of the accumulation of toxic chemical and biological contaminants in soil (Elbana et al. ). In the agricultural sector, the use of fertilizers causes the accumulation of some potentially toxic elements that adversely affect plants and soil biota in the long term. Polluted air, wastewater, and the applied agrochemicals in agriculture can be considered as sources of soil pollution. These different sources can carry numerous organic, inorganic, and biological pollutants. The fate of different pollutants in a soil depends on the physical, chemical, and biological characteristics of the soil as well as pollutant characteristics. Reactivity and mobility of chemical pollutants are controlled by many factors including soil reaction (pH), soil organic matter (OM), ion exchange capacity, and calcium carbonate contents, oxides and hydroxides among other (Han ; Shaheen et al. ; Kabata-Pendias ; Kodešová et al. ). Consequentially, the different soils exhibit varied potentiality to retain or release certain contaminant. Moreover, the retention and release of a specific contaminant are regulated by adding another reactive chemical into the soil. Elbana and Selim () showed that the release of Cd was influenced by introducing Cu into a soil column, whereas the release of Pb was not affected by introducing Cd or Cu into a soil that has 2.8% CaCO3.

Vulnerability of surface and ground waters for contamination is directly related to polluted soil. This vulnerability depends on soil properties that control contaminant sorption and mobility in soil. The contaminants are generally more mobile in sandy soils that have low CaCO3, OM, and amorphous oxides contents than its mobility in the clay soils that usually exhibit higher CEC. Under intensive agricultural system, Muhammetoğlu et al. () explained that in addition to soil properties, the depth of the groundwater and the quality of irrigation water are key factors for groundwater vulnerability. Ceplecha et al. () applied vulnerability matrix as a field assessment tool to evaluate the groundwater vulnerability to nitrate contamination. They considered soil texture, irrigation efficiency, nitrogen application rate/timing, and best management practices for quantifying vulnerability rating. Aquifer contamination with N and P due to chemical fertilization in the Nile valley, Egypt was explored by Shamrukh et al. (). They concluded the implementation of the best management practices to control nitrate leaching especially for the newly reclaimed areas where there is an absence of clay–silt cap. In addition, they related the contamination of shallow depth with nitrate because of the nearness to the agricultural regions. However, their study emphasized that P fertilization was not the source of groundwater contamination. Moreover, the pesticides vulnerability of the Quaternary aquifer in Sohag area, Upper Egypt, was high to very high because of the high hydraulic conductivity of this aquifer (Ahmed ).

Since Beijing has already weaponized trade and other aspects of the country's economy against perceived Western containment and deployed and exported technologies to impair civil liberties, one can readily imagine the party using AI to further its agenda.

By some measures,  in AI research output and quality. This can put national security and societal stability at risk in other countries.

US government leaders and defense industry insiders have sounded the alarm about China’s advances in AI, and  now  that China is outpacing the United States in developing and fielding AI-enabled military systems. While it is impossible to know which country is ahead, and in which applications, China faces significant headwinds in its quest to develop and deploy military AI.

, Beijing remains dependent on the foreign semiconductors that provide the computing power it requires to develop high-end AI applications. Increasingly stringent US export controls have , to some degree, China’s AI ambitions.

But this exhortation makes his subsequent vow to work directly with “our competitors” to harness the power of AI “for good” all the more curious. Working with our competitors, like China, would only empower the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to write the rules of the road for AI. And we don’t want China in the driver’s seat.

China is at the bleeding edge of using emerging technologies for oppression—both at home and abroad. Journalists and human-rights activists have long pointed to a state-run data system that uses AI to flag whole categories of people for detention in the western Xinjiang region.

“These types of attacks pose one of the more significant risks to ground vehicles and in-field operations, where vehicles and personnel are left exposed and less able to maneuver across certain terrains,” Stewart says.

In the future, uncrewed systems powered by AI will be the norm, which will fundamentally change battlefield strategies, he argues.

The United States has major transportation infrastructure needs. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the surface transportation sector—defined as highway, public transportation, and rail facilities—will face an investment shortfall of approximately $1 trillion over the next decade.Public-private partnerships (P3s) are often mentioned as a solution to this shortfall.1 This idea is simply wrong. State and local government project sponsors do not lack access to financing but rather have insufficient tax revenues to repay new project debts. As the U.S. Treasury Department notes, “All infrastructure investments ultimately depend on either user fees, government tax revenues, or a combination of both.”2 Government project sponsors can access low-cost financing through the municipal bond market and the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) loan program at the U.S. Department of Transportation.3 Private financing in the form of private activity bonds (PABs) and equity capital are still project obligations that must be repaid. Simply changing the source of project debts through a P3 does not resolve the two most common restraints on government revenues: economic hardship and insufficient political support.Public-private partnerships offer state and local governments the ability to shift project risks to a private concessionaire in ways that are not possible through traditional design-bid-build procurement. When structured properly, P3 agreements allow project sponsors to offload three categories of risk: delivery, finance, and operations.4 The private concessionaire charges a premium price for taking on project risks. A key challenge for project sponsors is determining the appropriate risk-adjusted price to ensure that the procurement is cost-beneficial. Given the nation’s major need for expanded and improved surface transportation infrastructure, it is crucial that policymakers understand that risk transference through P3s is not guaranteedP3 failuresProponents of P3s often present risk transference as effectively carried out once the project sponsor and the concessionaire have both signed a contract. This basic description of P3s is accurate but incomplete. Under this conception, the P3 contract is sufficient to ensure that failure will negatively affect the private concessionaire, equity investors, and other creditors—but not the state.Yet this transactional description of risk transference neglects the fact that the government always remains the ultimate guarantor of project delivery. When a concessionaire fails to fulfill their contractual obligations, the state is forced to take over project delivery—even when this involves substantial delays and cost overruns. The reason the state cannot escape its position of responsibility is essentially political—not in the sense of partisan gamesmanship but because the state is held accountable through public elections.When a state or local elected official announces a major transportation project, they create a government commitment to the public. The specific details regarding the method of procurement are irrelevant to this political contract between voters and their elected representatives. When the government makes a pledge, the public expects the state to follow through and build what it has committed to build. Elected officials know this. After all, the ballot box holds politicians accountable, not construction subcontractors.On a practical level, failure to complete a project can have two negative consequences. First, if a promised facility remains unbuilt, residents and businesses must continue to deal with the inadequacies of the existing system that gave rise to the project in the first place. Second, a P3 failure that results in significant losses for bondholders could have harmful long-term effects on future project financing—even if the losses occur on a PAB that does not carry a full faith and credit pledge from the government.Interest rates on debt principally reflect investor expectations about inflation over time and risk. When the market perceives a particular investment or borrower as risky, interest rates on debt rise. If bondholders lose a significant portion of their investment due to the nonperformance of contract obligations by a concessionaire, this can produce reputational damage for the state or local government project sponsor. In particular, a P3 contract failure signals to future investors that the government may again make a poor choice when selecting a concessionaire. In response, the market would likely demand a higher interest rate on PABs issued for future P3 contracts.

Additionally, allowing bondholders to suffer significant losses sends a strong signal to the market about the politics of a particular state or local government. Debt issued in relation to public infrastructure projects may carry an implicit guarantee that the government will backstop the debt should problems arise. Even though a PAB may not carry a full faith and credit pledge, the market may assume that the state will take steps to protect investors. If the state chooses to allow investor losses, the market learns that no implicit guarantee exists and prices this fact into future debt offerings.

In the period 1977–2010, about 71% of all research-oriented partnerships in the biotechnology industry failed before the product under development had reached the market [Havenaar and Hiscocks (2012)]. It must be emphasized that only about 46% of failed partnerships were terminated due to unsatisfactory research results, while in about half the cases the problems appeared to be due to inter-organizational relationships. Biotechnology companies, however, have to rely on numerous cooperation partners, in the context of research-oriented as well as other partnerships along the value chain [Hagedoorn and Duysters (2002)]. The company's success is therefore particularly dependent on the capabilities of all the partner companies, the design of the respective partnerships and ultimately on the success of the strategic partnerships [Baum et al. (2000)]. The analysis of factors that explain the success of strategic partnerships in research-intensive industries such as the biotechnology industry can help companies to reduce the high failure rates. Given the importance of strategic partnerships for biotechnology companies, empirically validated success factors can therefore lead to significant efficiency gains. In previous academic work, the investigation of the success factors of interfirm partnerships took place in the context of different theoretical approaches and different industry sectors [Duysters et al. (1999); Gulati (1998); Jiang et al. (2008); Kale and Singh (2007); Pekar and Allio (1994); Taylor (2005); Zollo et al. (2002)]. However, many of the existing works only use a single predominant theoretical approach, or focus on factors that are of relevance at or after the formation of a strategic partnership [Deitz et al. (2010); Mohr and Spekman (1994)]. Frequently no account is taken of the specificities that occur with regard to the measurement of success in partnerships. In addition, there are only a few studies which deal with the characteristics of research-intensive industries and in particular of the biotechnology industry [Al-Laham et al. (2010); Baden-Fuller and Morgan (2010); Baum et al. (2000); Stuart (2000); Zollo et al. (2002)]. From the perspective of the present study, these aspects can be an explanation of why the failure rate for partnerships in the biotechnology industry, despite the many years of scientific investigation of potential success factors, is still unsatisfactorily high. The aim of this study is thus to derive factors from the resource-oriented approach as well as from the relationship-oriented approach and to verify empirically their impact on the success of strategic partnerships in the medical biotechnology industry. The derived factors thus relate to aspects that may be relevant both at and after the formation of the partnership. In summary, we can derive the following research question for this work: What factors influence the success of a strategic partnership in the medical biotechnology industry from the perspective of the resource- and relationship-oriented approach? The study is structured as follows: Chap. 2 deals with the basics of strategic partnerships in research-intensive industries. In this context, structure and aims of strategic partnerships along the value chain of the medical biotechnology industry are described. In Chap. 3, the hypotheses are derived in the light of the existing literature and an appropriate model is formulated. In Chap. 4, the results of the empirical study are presented and discussed. Chapter 5 continues with a summary of the results, making particular reference to the limitations of this work and the need for further research.