The paper empirically investigates the phenomenon of patent litigation through the analysis of the all population of European patents’ opposition cases in the telecommunication industry. We recover the complete legal history of each dispute and the patent portfolios of the firms involved. We...

Several scholars have tried to focus on growth accounting of specific examples of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs). But, what are the factors that might make a General Purpose Technology succeed or fail once the invention has been "triggered"? This paper is a preliminary answer to this...

The paper provides summary statistics from the KEINS database on academic patenting in France, Italy, and Sweden. It shows that academic scientists in those countries have signed many more patents than previously estimated. This re?evaluation of academic patenting comes by considering all...

Academic inventors are university scientists who appear as designated inventors of patents whose assignee may be either a business company, their own academic institution, or a governmental administration. The paper analyses their relationships entertained with co?inventors, who may be either...

The economic literature on technical change has increasingly relied upon patent citation data to measure inter-personal knowledge flows. Many doubts exist on whether patent citations really reflect the designated inventors’ knowledge of both their technical fields, and of the other inventors...

We investigate the scientific productivity of Italian academic inventors, namely academic researchers designated as inventors on patent applications to the European Patent Office, 1978-1999. We use a new longitudinal data set comprising 299 academic inventors, and as many matching controls...