Innovation is widely acknowledged as one of the main forces driving economic growth. However, despite our significant knowledge of the technological determinants of innovation processes, an adequate understanding of demand side factors is still lacking. This paper aims to survey the literature...

University-industry knowledge transfer is nowadays a very fashionable research subject, both in economics, and in management and policy studies. "Distance" between the two realms of academic and industrial research has been increasingly called in to explain the extent at which the academic...

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...

This paper provides novel empirical evidence on the private value of patents and R&D. We analyze an unbalanced sample of firms from five EU countries - France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the UK in the period 1985-2005. We explore the relationship between firm’s stock market value and...

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...

In this paper we provide an introduction to some of the most salient aspects of the debate regarding the relationships between stronger intellectual property rights (IPRs) regimes and innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. We emphasize that, despite increased knowledge on the subject, little...

Based on longitudinal data for a matched sample of 592 Italian academic inventors and controls, the paper explores the impact of patenting on university professors’ scientific productivity, as measured by publication and citation counts. Academic inventors (university professors who appear as...