It is necessary to have clear principles for vesting ownership in academic employee inventions to maximise their efficient and effective protection under patent law and their further development and exploitation. The agreed default policy that Australian granting bodies and universities adopted...

This paper presents evidence that firms face a trade-off between the quantity and quality of their research output. The econometric analysis uses survey data on patent applicants at the European Patent Office and addresses the identification problem caused by differences in firms' propensity to...

Novel early stage ideas face uncertainty on the expertise needed to elaborate them, which creates a need to circulate them widely to find a match. Yet as information is not excludable, shared ideas may be stolen, reducing incentives to innovate. Still, in idea-rich environments inventors may...

The inventive concept in patent law, central to the Supreme Court's test for whether a patent is invalid because of obviousness, lacks clarity. This article discusses that lack of clarity with reference to the vague and inconsistent treatment of the inventive concept in the jurisprudence of the...

We investigate how patent classification influences the interpretation of patent statistics. Innovation researchers currently make use of various patent classification schemas, which are hard to replicate. Using machine learning techniques, we construct a transparent, replicable and adaptable...

Throughout the history of patent law, the manner of representation of invention influenced the process of the patent office in prosecuting them. This chapter traces how changes in the representation of the invention — from material to textual to digital — transformed patent prosecution....

In The Netherlands, the rights of employees to an invention are governed by the Dutch Patent Act of 1995 (DPA), whereas otherwise the rights and obligations of employees are governed by the Dutch Civil Code. Only two provisions of the Patent Act, articles 12 and 14, specifically deal with the...