intellectual property

This paper analyzes the spatial distribution of “creativity” -- the production of new knowledge. The authors analyze commercial patents granted in Sweden during 1994-2001 using a panel of one hundred labor market areas which encompass the entire country.

This paper analyzes a random sample of interferences to investigate the impact of patent policies on innovation strategies. Results contribute to the policy debate over the appropriate scope of patents and the revision of the U.S. patent priority structure.

In the 1990s, patenting schemes changed in many respects: upcoming new technologies accelerated the shift from price competition towards competition based on technical inventions, a worldwide surge in patenting took place, and the patent thicket arose as a consequence of strategic patenting. This study analyzes the importance of patenting versus secrecy as an effective alternative to protect intellectual property in the inventions market phase.

One of the findings of the patent races literature is that, in a competitive market setting, firms’ noncooperative choices of research projects display an excessive degree of correlation, as compared to the socially optimal level. The paper revisits this question in a context in which firms have access to trade secrets, in addition to patents, to assert intellectual property rights over their discoveries.

Technological change is argued to be taking place along ordered and selective pat-terns, shaped jointly by technological and scientific principles, and economic and other societal factors. Historical, descriptive analysis is often used to analyze these trajectories. Recently, quantitative methods have been proposed to map these tra-jectories. It is argued that such methods have, so far, not been able to illuminate the engineering side of technological trajectories.

This paper investigates whether the distinction between patent citations added by the inventor or the examiner is relevant for the issue of geographical concentration of knowledge flows. The authors use information in the search reports of patent examiners at the European Patent Office to construct our dataset of regional patenting in Europe, and apply various econometric models to investigate our research question.

This study presents an empirical analysis of the extent to which stronger intellectual property rights promote international technology transfer through licensing activities. The analysis focuses on licensing activities of U.S. multinationals as well as on international licensing alliances between firms in developing and developed nations. Both aggregate level data and firm level data are examined.

The paper examines the relationships between business strategy, innovation strategy and intellectual property strategy and illustrate these via case studies.

By drawing information from a survey of inventors of 9,017 European patents (PatVal-EU), this paper provides novel and detailed data about the characteristics of the European inventors, the
sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations among researchers and institutions, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of the patents.

The author reports new evidence for localized knowledge spillovers identified by within-patent variations in the geographic matching rates of citations added by inventors and citations added by examiners.