One of the recognised challenges identified at the creation of PRIME dealt with appropriation, transfer, commercialisation and access of knowledge faced to multiple debates on the enlargement of patenting possibilities (genome, software) and on alternative practices (such as open source software). Two central issues were identified, dealing with start-up firms and intellectual property rights. The ambition of Prime was to focus on specific aspects that required further inquiry in these issues which have attracted both numerous academic works and multiple policy developments.

The first issue dealt with start-up firms in general, and spin-off firms from universities in particular. Was it a way to ‘privatise’ or on the contrary to ‘disseminate’ knowledge that would otherwise not be shaped in a way to make it accessible to most economic actors? Two projects dealt with the issue.
Rebaspinoff focused on the new firms, their conditions of creation and development. It proposed both a new integrated approach to the question (see article in Research Policy) and a new typology (exposed in the 2007 book on entrepreneurship). The policy recommendations made were debated in the Pisa conference (February 2007) and published in SPP (April 2008).
Venture Fun took a complementary approach focusing on the role of venture capital. Through a country (Finland, France & Israel) and domain (IT and biotechnologies) comparative analysis, researchers have highlighted the intermediating role of venture capital, while discussing the importance and conditions of emergence of venture capital as an industry.
Both projects have proposed joint workshops and conferences (Sestri Levante et Milano, 2008) and member teams of both projects have proposed and obtained a new FP7 project to further develop their approach and results.

A second set of questions dealt with models of knowledge circulation and access. Prime had decided to be complementary to the numerous on-going work under development (see in particular the EPIP consortium). The CIPR project has analysed three ‘specific’ problems which shed a complementary light on IPR debates. One key problem lies in the changes of ontological assumptions, from protecting texts to protecting objects, which underlie the new institutional developments associated to biotechnology protection. This raises strong issues about the performance and effects of protection when functions supposed to be associated to objects do not fully materialise.
The development of collective management of IPR is a growing source of changing practices. It is investigated as a source of nurturing variety and improving innovation processes, through the variety of means to achieve it, and through its implications for competition policy.
A large inquiry of software firms conducted at the European level (ELISS sub-project) finally puts in perspective the battle between closed and open source software, showing that most firms now mix both and thus displace the source of competition and innovative distinction.