Based on a survey of the inventors of 9,017 European patented inventions, this paper provides new information about the characteristics of European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and...

In this paper, we give an overview on recent developments in the research on national innovation systems (NIS). Essentially, we identify three development lines of the concept. These are policy-oriented studies that frequently combine the NIS approach with the terminology of corporate...

The impact of patent protection on biomedical innovation has been a controversial issue. Although a "medical anti-commons" has been predicted due to a proliferation of patents on upstream technologies, evidence to test these concerns is only now emerging. However, most industrial surveys that...

The paper analyses the contribution of 'golden papers' - seminal works whose ideas remain as fresh and relevant today as when they were first published decades ago - and which continue to dominate academic discourse among successive generations of scholars. The authors analyse why two works...

An instrumental variable econometric model is specified to investigate how changes in a country’s patent protection for pharmaceutical innovations are related to patent awards from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to the country’s applicants. We use a new measure of patent protection for...

The process of developing technology through open discussion has been called collective invention. Open source software projects have this form. This paper documents two earlier episodes of collective invention and proposes a general model based on search theory. One episode was the development...

This paper proposes a model where firms invest in secrecy to limit technological spillovers accruing to their competitors, in addition to investing in cost-reducing R&D. The main result of the paper is that increases in spillovers increase secrecy, suggesting that legal and strategic protection...

This paper offers some reflections on the institutions for the governance of knowledge as an economic asset, and its management in firms. It then relies on a research based on a survey of a large number of patents (PatVal-EU) to discuss specific features of the invention system in Italy. The...

When companies decide to engage in technology transfer through licensing to other firms, they have two basic options: to use standard licensing contracts or to set-up more elaborate partnership-embedded licensing agreements. We find that broader partnership-embedded licensing agreements are...

Recent empirical studies suggest a need for a flexible patent regime responding to industry characteristics. In practice, sector-specific modifications of patent strength already exist but lack theoretical foundation. This paper intends to make up for this neglect by scrutinizing in what...