At its core, a patent is a monopoly. The patent system's fundamental logic is to grant exclusive rights for a fixed period in exchange for public disclosure of a technology, encouraging research and development investment and commercialization. Public R&D has long operated on the same principle. Universities and government-funded research institutes secure patents, and companies access those technologies through licensing agreements. Royalties have served both as a revenue source for research institutions and as an important reward for individual researchers. Yet the reality surrounding public patents is far from simple.
One complaint heard particularly often from small and medium-sized enterprise owners is: "Why should we pay high fees to use technology developed with taxpayer money through national R&D?" Small and medium-sized enterprises and startups frequently abandon public patents altogether because of royalty burdens, complex negotiation procedures and legal uncertainty. A deeper problem is that a significant share of public patents never reach the industrial sector at all — they simply go to waste. General-purpose technologies, platform technologies and early-stage technologies are prime examples: they carry high potential for broad industrial diffusion but are poorly suited to exclusive commercialization.
The current system attempts a compromise between exclusivity and public interest. South Korea has in principle adopted a non-exclusive license model for transferring national R&D outcomes, allowing multiple companies to use the same technology — a more public-minded approach than granting exclusive rights to a single firm. From a company's perspective, however, knowing that competitors can access the same technology weakens the investment incentive. Ultimately, the current public patent regime, in trying to satisfy both exclusivity and public interest at the same time, risks falling short on both counts.
One alternative worth considering is a dual-track patent management system — running technologies that require exclusivity on a "dedicated patent" track while placing technologies where broad diffusion matters on a separate "open patent" track. Under the dedicated track, a specific company would receive exclusive or near-exclusive rights, enabling bold investment and commercialization. Under the open track, anyone could use the technology at relatively low cost through a streamlined process, accelerating its spread across industry. Open patents could also serve as a kind of defensive patent strategy to protect South Korea's industrial ecosystem: by enabling domestic companies to adopt a technology widely before foreign firms can monopolize it, the country preserves its technological leadership. Similar experiments have been tried abroad. The United Kingdom's Easy Access IP program allowed universities to offer some of their patents to companies royalty-free under simple agreements, lowering the barrier for early-stage technologies to enter the market. The program had limited revenue-generating potential, but it showed that technologies which would never have been commercialized under a conventional exclusive model could still find their way into industry.
Open patents could also offer a practical solution to the maintenance burden that weighs on research institutions. Even after a project ends, patents must be kept active for years, and the annual maintenance fees represent a real cost for researchers and their institutions. If many companies use a technology under an open patent, the cost of maintaining that patent can effectively be shared across society.
For open patents to take hold, a new reward system for inventors is also needed. Just as academic papers are evaluated by citation counts, open patents could adopt the number of companies using a technology and the breadth of its diffusion as new performance metrics. A national incentive system that provides separate compensation to researchers who contribute to technology diffusion is also worth exploring.
The ultimate purpose of public R&D is not simply to recoup royalties but to drive industrial development and create social value. Exclusivity still matters. Not every technology, however, is best utilized through monopoly alone. The time has come to move beyond the binary of monopoly or openness and adopt a new public patent strategy — one flexible enough to apply both models in parallel, calibrated to the nature of each technology and its potential industrial impact.
Min Byeong-gwon is head of the Research Strategy Division at the National Research Council of Science and Technology.
nbgkoo@heraldcorp.com
