Rewarding Creativity Through Intellecual Property Rights

Nowadays, exploiting an unlimited resource, such as the human mind, represents a gold mine, a new way to social and economic development. The potential of added –value creation is based directly on the creativity of the human resource, innate trait and / or developed over time, supported and managed in a favourable working environment.The creativity of the human resource shows up as the prime production factor in the new sector of the economy, the creative economy. For a long time, creativity was related to the human resources’ quality, the labour as a production factor, yet there are several fields where work can be highly effienciently performed without needing to much creativity; thus, in such cases, we cannot affirm that the workers involved are not of a high quality just because the nature of their work does’t require the creation of something new or to conduct an activity in their own way. However all the economic activities involve creativity, but in different proportions. In all economic activities there are some creative parts of the process, but the creative economy includes only those activities which represent harvest of the human intellect or represent instant perfomances of the individual thus generating value, something that even the performer could no longer perform in exactly the same way. Creativity, although it is unlimited, it is not ubiquitous. The degree of creativity varies from individual to individual, and it must be rewarded just like any other work. In some situations the creative work is rewarded by wages, but it is also rewarded by intellectual property rights, such as: copyrights, patents and trademarks; these have been designed to recognize and protect human intellect’s effort. This paper aims to highlight the importance of the human creativity and its great potential in generating added-value presenting the exports and imports of intellectual property in the European Union. There is also a study analysing the existing trend regarding the patents and trademarks applications number, revealing some interesting aspects concerning the Romania’s demand and offer on the creative products’ market.