What are patent families? What is the impact of adopting one definition or another? Are some definitions of patent families better suited than others for certain uses in statistical and economic analysis? The aim of this paper is to provide some answers to these questions, compare the...

We investigate statistically the characteristics, functioning and incidence of pre-emptive patenting, defined as patent filings whose main effect is to hamper the grant of other patents. Patent applications can be used to prevent the grant of exclusive rights on markets and technologies to...

As firms shift to more open models of innovation based on collaboration and external sourcing of knowledge, they are exploiting their intellectual property, notably patents, not only by incorporating protected inventions into new products, processes and services, but also by licensing them to...

Open innovation has received a lot of attention in the business management literature and recently also in policy discussions. Until now, most of the empirical evidence has been based on case study work offering detailed insights into some best practices of open innovation in companies’...