Businesses and society rarely function in isolation. Public policies and business practices directly impact the efficiency and profitability of the other. Understanding how businesses and governments approach productivity and innovation is the focus of Professor Ivan Png Paak Liang from NUS Business School.

A leading Singapore economist, Prof Png investigates how patents and secrecy serve as mechanisms by which businesses appropriate the returns from innovations. Trade secrets can be held for an unlimited duration while patents only provide exclusive rights to the inventor for twenty years. Further trade secrets extend to subject matter such as customer lists that are not patentable. Businesses worldwide report secrecy to be more effective in appropriability than patents. Prof Png’s research found a nuanced relation between changes in trade secrets law and R&D among U.S. businesses. This relation increases with the size of the company — as measured by sales revenues.

Recently, Prof Png was awarded the Social Science Research Thematic Grant to conduct research into service productivity. In this interdisciplinary project, scholars with diverse expertise such as data analytics, optimisation, stochastic modelling, applied microeconomics, and behavioural science work together to advance new scientific knowledge in the disciplines. Partnering with both public service agencies and private sector enterprises, the research integrates econometric methods and a series of field experiments to develop cost-effective and scalable strategies, raising the productivity levels of several service industries.