Conflict Strategies in Innovation Markets (1850-1990)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Louis Pahlow
• Subject Area: Economic and Social History
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 461383753

Innovation-based markets play an important role in economic research, which is now also concerned with the strategic instrumentalization of industrial property rights and related competitive positions. At the latest, the long-standing legal dispute between Apple and Samsung has made it clear to a broad public that legal positions such as patents or design rights can also result in substantial conflicts, the economic consequences of which can hardly be ignored, not only for the companies that are involved, but also for the economy as a whole. The present network initiative therefore aims to place conflicts between market actors and the mechanisms for their resolution at the center of a historical-interdisciplinary discourse. The object of investigation will be disputes over industrial property rights (including patents, trademarks, design rights) as well as related concepts of protection (such as the cartel and competition regime), which, during the period under study between 1850 and 1990, lead us to expect valid findings on the triggering, settlement and management of conflicts. The aim of the network applied for here is to enable an interdisciplinary exchange for the present topic area in order to make visible differences and desiderata, but also overlaps and synergies in the respective disciplines. The network should thereby firstly contribute to sharpening conflict strategies as an object of economic and corporate history and legal history and thereby facilitate an interdisciplinary exchange. Such a profiling also serves a necessary objectification of the topic, which has been and will be strongly charged in the current public discourse. Secondly, the network is to develop a methodological offer at the interfaces of the historical subdisciplines mentioned above in order to establish conflict strategies as a common field of research in which commonalities and overlaps are made visible and usable, but also methodological differences are specified in order to exploit the potential of the research field for academic, but also public debate. At the forefront of the network is the question of how companies managed conflicts under competitive conditions, what instruments they used to do so, and how they integrated the resulting consequences into their business activities. In this way, the network aims not only to define the subject matter of conflicts or their categorization in innovation markets, but also to help decipher strategies for dealing with them.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks