On April 2 and 3 of next year a conference will be held at Sant'Anna Scuool of Advanced Studies in Pisa on the topic " What Motivates Inventors to Invent?". This is the third meeting of the EPIP (European Policy for Intellectual Property) network, funded by the European Commission and lead by Dominique Foray and Jacques Mairesse. The partners of EPIP are IMRI from Université Paris-Dauphine in France, MERIT from University Maastricht in the Netherlands, Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Italy, INNO-tec from the Munich School of Management in Germany, Roskilde University in Denmark, and the Santiago de Compostella University in Spain. For more information of the network, please visit the website at:

The first EPIP meeting took place in Munich on the magnificent premises of the European Patent Office with over hundred participants, lawyers and economists, academics as well as practitioners (from the business world and the patent offices) from Europe and the United States. The papers presented at this conference touched upon many themes and challenges of the intellectual property rights system. The program of the Pisa conference is also available on this website.

The second conference, held in Maastricht, focused on research tools and databases, as major inputs of science and technology. It explored the consequences for scientific research of governments' encouraging intellectual property protection for certain inventions, in the form of patents (on research tools) and sui generis rights (data bases) in order to foster their impact on the economy through commercialisation.

This seminar organized by Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa will focus on the incentives that motivate inventors. Chief among these are the property rights to their fruits of their inventions (Intellectual Property Rights), but throughout history alternative mechanisms have existed and successfully promoted invention at various times and in various places. These mechanisms include invention awards and prizes, the incentive structures provided in the "Republic of Science," including professional reputation, recognition, and advancement and the need for knowledge to exchange with others, open source software, and collective invention more broadly. We encourage papers on this range of topics, especially those with an empirical, historical, or sociological perspective.