This paper analyses whether strategic motives for patenting influence the characteristics ofcompanies’ patent portfolios. We use the number of citations and oppositions to representthese characteristics. The investigation is based on survey and patent data from German companies.We find clear...

The increasing commercialization of university discoveries has initiated acontroversy on the impacts for future scientific research. It has been argued that anincreasing orientation towards commercialization may have a negative impact onmore fundamental research efforts in science. Several...

Technological change is often hypothesized as one of the main drivers of mergeractivities. This paper analyzes the role of technology in mergers and acquisitions(M&As) at the firm level. Based on a newly created data set that combines financialinformation and patent data for public limited...

Using a new dataset encompassing more than 2,200 inventions made by Max Planck Societyresearchers from 1980 to 2004, we explore how licensee and technology characteristics affectthe licensing and commercialization of technologies from public research. We find noevidence that spin-offs and...

This paper seeks to understand the intriguing but only sparsely explored phenomenon of “leisure timeinvention,” where the main underlying idea for the new product or process occurs when the inventor isaway from the workplace. We add to previous research by focussing on the inventive...

The aim of this paper is to test whether patent-based indicators are still reliable measures of innovativeness in light of organizational changes in the field of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection and the regulatory reforms already under way respectively at the U.S. Patent and...

Significant amount of vertical technology transfer occurs betweendeveloped and developing country firms, yet the literature on intellectual propertyrights did not pay much attention to this aspect...

We show that, for licensing by an outside innovator in a Cournot oligopoly,royalty licensing can generate higher payoff to the innovator than the fixed-feelicensing and auction if the labor market is unionized...

We show the incentive for divisionalization by a monopolist producer. Incontrast to the previous literature, where divisionalization occurs for product marketadvantage, we show that divisionalization occurs if it provides strategic advantage inthe labor market. With unionized labor market, we...

An important discussion in recent years is the introduction of product patentsand the abolition of process patents. In a model with endogenous number of innovatingfirms, we show that whether product patent increases R&D is ambiguous, and depends onthe type of market demand and the cost of R&D....