Innovation is both a central aspect of industry policy and a crucial management issue for individual firms. Governments strive to devise policy settings that encourage innovation in industry; and no individual firm can ignore the innovation imperative in its decision-making. The distinct factors that determine the shape and size of the innovation spend are many and varied, complex in their interaction and challenging to conceptualise. Inventive individuals, firms and institutions are motivated by incentives ranging from the purely personal to the structural, including the competitive imperatives of market dynamics. In industry, a firm's R&D investment decisions are influenced by its perceived ability to capture sufficient returns from innovative products introduced into a competitive market where consumers determine commercial success. By deploying various strategies, individually or in combination, an innovative firm can profit from innovation even in the presence of avid imitators. Many available strategies are practical (for instance keeping an invention secret, or relying on imitation lag), and are considered in the broader innovation management literature. This book focusses on the role of law, ie of reliance on the various rights and remedies of intellectual property law to prevent or limit imitation and increase returns from innovation.

The subsistence, structure, scope and interaction of relevant intellectual property rights impacts on individual decisions to invest in innovation, so they are a significant topic of study and evaluation from the innovation and technology policy perspective.