A ‘patent box’, ‘innovation box’, ‘intellectual property (IP) box’ or ‘knowledge box’ is a special tax regime that includes tax exemptions or deductions for activities related to research, innovation or intellectual property. These regimes have often been labelled a type of ‘harmful tax practice’, since they have been used by multinational corporations to avoid taxation by shifting profits out of the countries where they do business and into a patent box in a foreign country, where the profits are taxed at very low levels or not at all (source).