Innovation and Dynamic Efficiency in Plant Biotechnology: An Introduction to the Researchable Issues

The unprecedented consolidation of the agricultural plant biotechnology and seed industries in the late 1990s raised concerns about the development and control of agricultural biotechnologies for farmers. Patent applications increased exponentially, and their concentration in the hands of a few corporations was ominously dubbed “the problem of the anticommons” (Heller & Eisenberg, 1998). The 1990s witnessed legal challenges to many key patents, complaints by scientists and industry that they could not commercialize products that relied on intellectual properties patented by private firms, record numbers of mergers and acquisitions to integrate the biotechnology and seed industries, and complex thickets of interwoven patents that prevented even the most skilled negotiators from obtaining rights to disseminate innovative technologies. Industry responded by aggressively consolidating, so that enabling intellectual properties were owned by the same company, which could then move forward with the commercialization of new agricultural technologies. This introductory paper has two objectives: (a) to describe the data available for analysis of the plant biotechnology industry, including the introduction and application of a new agricultural biotechnology patent dataset, and (b) to provide a conceptual and empirical background on topics relevant to plant biotechnology that are covered in this issue. We begin this paper with a description of the available data, because the data condition our presentation of empirical background on topics relevant to plant biotechnology.