Patents for inventions are at the crossroad of law, technology and economics, with the Patent System resting on two fundamental assumptions: one, that technical progress is desirable and that disclosure is preferable to secrecy; two, that a competitive market economy is in the public interest,...

This paper estimates the process of diffusion and decay of knowledge from university, public laboratories and corporate patents in six countries and tests the differences across countries and across technological fields using data from the European Patent Office. It finds that university and...

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...

The paper describes the methodogy used to build a database on academic inventors from France, Italy, and Sweden (1978-2004), which was delivered to the European Commission as part of the KEINS project (Knowledge-Based Entrepreneurship: Innovation, Networks and Systems), and will provide the...