In the presence of asymmetric information, economic agents need to communicate their quality to investors and other parties. This paper investigates how information generated during the patenting process affects the ability of new ventures to attract VC financing. While much of the literature on...

This paper examines the intertemporal returns of patented inventions using estimates of patent value obtained from German employee inventors’ compensation records. The paper finds heterogeneity in the mean age and dispersion of the annual returns by technology and cumulative patent value....

How do new industries emerge? This paper aims to answer this question by analyzing the key actors in this process. We focus on the new industry of service robot. By using data of Japanese patent applications, we analyze the role of new firms and of collaborations. We find that the emergence of...

R&D encompasses plenty of activities which are usually summarized under the terms of basic research, applied research and development. Although basic research is often associated with low appropriability it provides the fundamental basis for subsequent applied research and development....

This paper describes a new patent-based indicator of inventive activity. The indicator is based on counting all the priority patent applications filed by a country's inventors, regardless of the patent office in which the application is filed, and can therefore be considered as a complete...

External innovation increases the profits of the median firm, but also increases dispersion and the kurtosis of the distribution of profits. This means that external strategies are risky and may require a very large number of attempts before average returns are obtained. This puts smaller firms...

This paper analyzes how founders and their families influence R&D intensity. Information on R&D comes from a large-scale, bi-annual survey among listed German firms. We find that R&D intensity is higher in firms that are actively managed by the family. The impact of family control (via voting...

Contrary to an accepted wisdom, this paper shows that cross-country variations in the number of patents per researcher do not only reflect differences in the propensity to patent but also signals differences in research productivity. We put forward and test an empirical model that formally...

How relevant is innovation by demand compared to innovation by other actors in a sector? In quantitative terms, this is a yet unanswered question. The current study fills this major gap in the literature on industry studies. By taking a sectoral system perspective, this study is able to...