intellectual property

Patenting new products in pharmaceuticals industry is of greater importance than in the other high technology branches of industry nowadays, according to the authors. The paper reviews the TRIPS agreement and explores patent protection in the global economy.

This paper examines how the framework of path-dependency and technological trajectories can be applied to explain the observed distribution of patent values as it is revealed in the distribution of patent citations.

This paper develops a framework of analysis for the impact of patent rights on biomedical innovation in “technology follower” developing countries. Based on the framework developed in the paper, empirical data collected in an industry-level survey of the Indian pharmaceutical industry between November 2004 and January 2005 is used to analyze the impact of patent rights as recognized under the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) on biomedical innovation in technology followers.

This report summarises the main conclusions and discussions held at the International Conference in Berlin. The conference aimed to examine the different ways in which patents contribute to business value and economic growth and highlight implications for government policy. As the report illustrates, issues of patent valuation and exploitation are gaining in importance in the public and private sectors and will benefit from continued exchanges among stakeholders from business, government and academia.

This paper utilizes the renewal records of the EPO (European Patent Office) patents and estimates the patent value distributions in Germany, France and the U.K. An interesting finding, according to the author, is that the EPO patent holders are found to be much more willing to invest resources on finding new commercialization strategies in order to exploit their patented idea than the national patent holders in Pakes (1986).

The author examines the joint patent designation-renewal behavior of the EPO patent applicants during 1978 to 1996, using both nonparametric technique and a parametric model. Findings indicate that the value of patent rights increases with the economics size of the country and has a modestly increasing returns to scale.

Patent system in Europe has undergone significant changes during the 1970s around the establishment of the European Patent Office (EPO), and this paper tries to quantify the influence of such policy changes on the private value of European patents. Based on the patent renewal records, the author estimates the private value of patents in Germany, France and the U.K. obtained through the EPO patenting route during the early 1980s, and compares the estimated value with the patent value in the same three countries before the establishment of the EPO, as estimated by Pakes (1986).

This paper investigates on an empirical basis the fact that researchers’ inventiveness could to a certain extent be independent from private economic incentives. It concludes by opening some analytical perspectives about the pros and cons of PROs’ knowledge and technology transfer strategies and by suggesting that the dominant model could well look inappropriate in some respects.

This paper examines the relationship between Intellectual Property (IP) and development, presenting a framework for assessing IP regimes both cross-nationally and over time. It is then shown how the trend toward harmonization places new and significant restrictions on developing countries’ opportunities for policy innovation in IP management.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the use of patents as a generally accepted indicator of
new knowledge and intermediate outputs of innovative activity more generally. It is intended as a background paper for further analysis based on the new so-called FEPOCI database on Finnish patents and related citations granted at the European Patent Office from the years 1991-2004.