It is crucial that patent offices grant protection only to those inventions that are novel and non-obvious. In 2004, the European Patent Office (EPO) made the unique move to systematically extend its prior art database by including documents shared among members of standard-setting...

In this paper, I analyze the commercialization of patents in the Swedish medicine & hygiene sector. A unique database makes it possible to use a new method, where I follow the commercialization process of individual patents. A surprisingly low share (10%) of the inventions was discovered at...

Following the latest comprehensive working paper proposal for the Intellectual Property Currency (IPC) at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=4160537, we have built a scenario showing a specific example of the IPC framework for better understanding it. The scenario describes a quantitative story...

This study focuses on the demand sector of smart factories, especially policies related to the introduction of smart factories by small and medium sized manufacturers. As will be explained later, discussions focusing on SMEs are important because the gap in capacity and resources between large...

This chapter serves to assess the quantity and impact of private agricultural research in developing countries, alongside the policies which affect that research. To provide context, an outline of the history, size and structure of private research presents data on research expenditures by...

Researchers have raised two concerns about the current patent approval process by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). First, it takes too long to process applications. Second, examiners make too many errors in the approval process. The first concern suggests that examiners...

The purpose of this paper is to empirically analyze the determinants of the Spanish public universities to generate patents. The empirical study is based on data of 47 Spanish public universities. First, we use a factorial analysis, which allows us to differentiate between two main factors that...