Two Nobel Prize winners want to cancel their own CRISPR patents in Europe

"But they make innovation thrive by providing an incentive to blah blah blah".

Not anymore in this day and age. Money comes mostly from the government, anyway, and plenty of really smart researchers would just be happy to put out their stuff out for the public benefit (and already do, btw). Even if they didn't the current patent system ends up giving them like 1% of profits, lol.

The business case for "but I want to protect the market I created" can be sufficiently solved with trade secrets and trademarks. Patents sound nice in theory, but in practice they only hinder innovation, the opposite of what they're supposed to do.

Do you think that companies doing research see a benefit in being able to patent their innovations? I.e. do patent protections provide them an incentive to do that research?

What would be the logical consequence of removing that incentive?

From the viewpoint of a lowly engineer with a dozen patents or so, I don't think I would have been paid to do all that research if my employers saw less returns for their investment.

So the patent is done after the fact as a "since we're here" approach. Completely different from "we're doing this exclusively to patent it".