What We Do...
Competition Dynamics analyzes, solves and testifies about economic problems at the intersection of antitrust, intellectual property, and international trade.
Why?
It is often asserted that antitrust and intellectual property laws exist in complete harmony. But one need look no further than today’s headlines to see that “competition” and “innovation” war with each other, in an apparently never-ending battle. At bottom, this battle can be reduced to a simple question: is the price of innovation too high or too low?
CD exists to frame and answer this question properly, in the context of complex disputes that arise in the world’s fastest-changing and most innovative markets. We produce analysis, testimony and economic research that not only reflects the rapid development of markets and the law, but that shapes that development. If competition and intellectual property could ever be confined to a closed economy, those days are now past. Global supply chains, global pricing and increasing divergence between the location of research and the location of manufacturing all mean that a large number of antitrust/IP disputes are now fought in the context of international trade.
We believe that the world needs, and rewards, more accurate, more reliable and more comprehensive solutions to global high-technology conflicts.
Our Story
Jon Putnam founded Competition Dynamics after more than 30 years of experience with the economics of intellectual property, R&D, productivity growth, industrial organization, and international trade.
Beginning in the late 1970s at Yale’s Economic Growth Center, Dr. Putnam studied the economic relationships among economic growth, R&D investments, and international flows of information and technology under Nobel Prize winners Tjalling Koopmans, James Tobin and Robert Shiller.
Dr. Putnam’s interest culminated in his Ph.D. thesis, The Value of International Patent Rights (1996). He became a “full-blooded” member of the “Tree of Zvi,” intellectual descendants of the late Harvard economist Zvi Griliches, the most influential scholar in the study of R&D and productivity growth.
That year, Dr. Putnam joined the competition practice of Charles River Associates and became the first full-time employee devoted to intellectual property matters.
With the opening of CD in 2012, Dr. Putnam created the first economic consulting firm devoted exclusively to the intersection of antitrust, intellectual property, and international trade. CD’s founding coincides with the ever-increasing prominence of these issues in the minds of courts, legislators, policy-makers, and of course the clients that must navigate often-uncharted waters.
Jon Putnam, Founder
Where?
CD is located on Boston’s North Shore, in Salem, Massachusetts, once America’s sixth-largest city and its largest port of trade. Within hailing distance stand the landmarks that past generations have conferred on us: the Custom House, from which Nathaniel Hawthorne oversaw the collection of import duties when he was not writing The Scarlet Letter; the House of the Seven Gables (Hawthorne’s other famous subject); and Lyceum Hall, the site of Alexander Graham Bell’s first public demonstration of long-distance telephony.
Salem gave us the National Guard, while neighboring Marblehead is the birthplace of the American Navy and of Marine aviation. The first missionaries to Asia sailed from Salem. Trade, technology, the creation of ideas, and the construction of public goods and institutions – these are the historical backdrops for CD and its forays into the international competitive dynamics of “science and the useful arts.”
Awards
IAM Magazine’s First-Ever Ranking of Top 30 Economic Experts in Intellectual Property
Competition Dynamics is pleased to have been included in Intellectual Asset Management magazine’s first-ever ranking of 30 top economic experts in the field of intellectual property.
IAM’s 2014 report, conducted as part of its “IAM 1000” global ranking of IP professionals, noted CD’s commitment to testimony at the intersection of antitrust, IP and international trade, and observed that CD’s “analysis has a certain rigor that is hard to find elsewhere.”
This award represents a welcome occasion for CD to highlight the many intelligent and creative attorneys and clients with whom we have been privileged to develop and present persuasive economic testimony at trial.
IAM is a global publication focusing on the strategic creation, exploitation and exchange of intellectual property assets. The online version of the 2014 report can be found at http://www.iam-magazine.com/patent1000/. A complete list of IAM’s ranking of economic experts, along with selections from the anonymous recommendations made by those surveyed, can be found here.