The joint increase in the number and size of patents filed around the world puts patent systems under pressure.This paper addresses issues in measuring the voluminosity of patent applications and highlights patterns in its evolution. The results – based on a 2 million EPO applications database...

Specific innovation capabilities enable large firms to depart from constant returns to scale and benefit from significant economies of scale. These capabilities improve the quality of the labor force organization and therefore positively impact labor productivity.

This paper investigates whether patent fee policies are a potential factor underlying the boom in patent applications observed in major patent offices. We provide the first panel-based evidence suggesting that fees affect the demand for patents in three major patent offices (EPO, USPTO and JPO),...

The joint increase in the number and size of patents filed around the world puts the patent system under pressure. This paper analyses the sources of this surge in number of claims and pages of patent applications at the EPO. Four hypotheses are scrutinized: the diffusion of national drafting...

This paper analyzes antecedents of patent activity of 87 European universities. The findings reveal that more patent activity is observed within larger universities and at universities that encompass engineering and biomedical departments. Higher levels of scientific productivity and contract...

The objective of this paper is to provide an in-depth analysis of the patenting performances of six Belgian universities over the period 1985-1999. Beside the evolution of the number of patent families, we provide insights about the potential value of these patents (through forward patent...

The objective of this paper is to assess whether and to what extent the cost of patenting affects the demand for patents. The empirical analysis, which focuses on the patent systems of the USA, Japan, and Europe during the year 2003, leads to the following methodological and empirical...

This paper investigates whether patent counts can be taken as indicators of macroeconomic innovation performance. The empirical model explicitly accounts for the two components of patenting output: research productivity and patent propensity. The empirical analysis aims at explaining the...

This paper investigates whether the Lisbon objective regarding the level of the European R&D intensity can be fulfilled. It first explains why the R&D intensity varies significantly across country. The countries with the highest R&D intensity ratio satisfy at least one of the following criteria:...