Patent trolls appropriate innovation rents by threatening to block other players’ R&D-related value creation. Legal loopholes and inefficiencies in court practice have been identified as drivers of these ‘locking-in-to-extort’ strategies, which might suggest that policy changes can...

Patent trolls (or sharks) are small patent holding individuals or firms who trap R&D intense manufacturers in patent infringement situations in order to receive damage awards for the illegitimate use of their technology. While of great concern to management, their existence and impact for both...

Novelty and non-obviousness (inventive step) are patentability requirements designed to ensure a minimum of technological quality for protected inventions. Their effectiveness requires the assumption that private values of patents are positively correlated with technological quality as defined...

We extend theory on private-collective innovation by studying the role of exclusion rights for technology in the competition between private-collective and other innovators. We argue that private-collective innovators both pledge their own and invest in orphan exclusion rights for technology as...

Industrial clusters develop regionally along the industry's lifecycle and typically exist over many product generations. In order to maintain their innovativeness, they have to develop and adjust along the industry lifecycle. We conduct 142 depth face-to-face interviews in clusters across two...

Most existing empirical work on technology diffusion assumes technologies to remain constant throughout the diffusion process. However, many consumer technologies improve significantly over time. Using data on the characteristics of new mobile handsets over a ten-year period and controlling for...

We document the evolution of product innovation and features in the mobile telephone handset market. We distinguish between two types of product innovation: vertical and horizontal innovation. Using data from 1990 - 2003, we find that some characteristics have subsequently become an industry...

Industrial clusters develop regionally along the industry's lifecycle and typically exist over many product generations. In order to maintain their innovativeness, they have to develop and adjust along the industry lifecycle. We conduct 142 depth face-to-face interviews in clusters across two...