Friday, April 6, 12:00 - 1:00pm PUP 367

James Bessen is a scholar who studies the economics of
innovation and patents. He has also been a successful innovator and CEO of a software company. Currently, Mr. Bessen is Lecturer in Law at the Boston University School of Law and Fellow at the Berkman Center on Internet and Society at Harvard.

Bessen has done research on whether patents promote
innovation, how and why innovators share new knowledge, and
on how firms developed new skills and technical knowledge
during the Industrial Revolution. His book, Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk (Princeton 2008) with Michael J. Meurer, highlights the problems caused by poorly defined property rights (“patent notice”).

In 1983, Bessen developed the first commercially successful
“what-you-see-is-what-you-get” PC publishing program, founding a company that delivered PC-based publishing systems to high-end commercial publishers. Intergraph Corporation acquired the company in 1993.

Get in on this opportunity to "chat" with James about the things he learned in business that seemed at odds with what he learned in the classroom (patents, sharing knowledge, the high cost of learning on the job, etc.)  He'll also discuss his recent research on this topic.