An IPRIA and IP Australia study of Designs Law and Practice
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Design capability is increasingly recognised as a source of competitive advantage among countries, and as central to how firms in a diverse range of industries strive to outperform their rivals (Gruber et al., 2015). Australia’s design workforce is small, compared to those of our competitor countries, though productive (Figure 1). However, Australia lags its global peers in the rate at which its design workforce is growing, and in its rate of growth in design intellectual property (IP) generation.
Recognising the importance of design for Australia’s future, IP Australia initiated a collaboration with the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia (IPRIA) at The University of Melbourne to produce a comparative study of designs law and practice. This study explores both design across industries within Australia, and how Australia compares for design with its international peers, including several major trading partners.
Recent studies have assessed the suitability of registered design rights as a source of potential information about design innovation (Filitz, Henkel and Tether, 2015; Tucci and Peters, 2015). Yet, there is a lack of research connecting design registrations with design inputs or investments (de Rassenfosse, 2017).
Our study brings together two well-established approaches for measuring design activity:
Design IP intensity is a measure of the number of designs registered in a country or industry.
Design labour intensity is a measure of the number of persons employed in design related occupations, either at the country or industry level.
Both these intensity measures are normalised to account for country or industry level differences.
This study is the first to our knowledge that brings together these methods to explore, simultaneously, the relative size of design labour forces, and their productivity in design IP generation.
The report is divided into seven sections inclusive of this introduction.
• Section 2 provides an overview of the designs legal system in Australia and the international context
• Section3brieflysetsoutthestudy’smethodology
• Section 4 explores how Australia compares to its international peers for design labour intensity and the intensity with which Australians use design IP
• Section 5 explores how industries within Australia vary in design labour intensity and design IP intensity
• Section 6 presents analysis of the design intensity of industries across national contexts
• Section 7 discusses potential factors that may affect registrations patterns and offers concluding remarks.
A central finding of this study is that the intensity with which a country makes use of the designs system increases with the design labour intensity of its workforce. Our findings also suggest that a country’s design IP intensity is positively associated with the degree to which design labour is concentrated across its industries. The question this raises is
how extensively the designs system encourages investment across the design community at large.
To gain greater understanding of Australia’s position, we explored the industries and products in which design filers focus (by “design filers” we refer to applicants of registered designs). Within Australia, residents and non-residents focus in contrasting sectors when registering designs. Australians typically focus in furniture, building materials and clothing manufacturing. By contrast, non-resident applicants maintain a focus in industries such as computer and telecommunications equipment manufacturing.
We identify those product classes in which there is the greatest imbalance between residents and non- residents in terms of their shares of a class’s total design filings. Of those product classes in which the focus of Australian and non-resident filers is most divergent, non-residents dominate within a large share. We find this to be the case also for certifications and renewals of registered designs. A potential implication is that non-residents focus more strongly on product classes with longer design lifecycles.
This research was conceived to generate inputs into IP Australia’s Designs Review Program. As such, our focus in studying design IP intensity is on registered design rights. Those design artefacts which are protected by other forms of IP or which are not protected at all fall outside the scope of this study.
Taking a narrow view of design, we identify from among our global peers several countries that are worthy of emulation as design leaders. We identify, as well, several followers with strengthening design economies. Denmark and Sweden are examples
of countries that are low in design IP intensity and low in design labour intensity also, but which are growing at a high rate on both measures.
In the Australian context, we identify industries which appear to underutilise the designs system, given their design labour intensity. This lays ground for further research to address the strengths and weaknesses of Australia’s designs system.
