Patent application numbers grow exponentially in many industries, a phenomenon that has been linked to high fragmentation of patent ownership. Contradicting these findings and theoretical arguments, we show that such fragmentation is not a precondition for sudden and strong increases in...

Defensive Publishing denotes publication of an invention with the purpose of creating prior art, and thus preventing patents being granted on this invention. Although widely employed, it has hardly been investigated empirically. Our study is based on 56 in-depth interviews, among others with...

In this paper, I describe and analyze the phenomenon of informal development collaboration between firms in the field of embedded Linux, a type of open source software. To explain the observed phenomenon of voluntary revealing, I develop a duopoly model of quality competition. The central...