When more than one component or activity is needed to produce the final product, a firm may use proprietary standards or adopt a common standard to integrate these components. We call these closed and open firms respectively, and develop a model of industry evolution to study the process by...

The strategies of rent appropriation and market structure are inter- dependent. How firms use patents depends upon industry structure, and in turn, affects industry structure. In the early part of the history of the chemical industry, market leaders combined patents and secrecy to deter entry....

Over the last decade, companies have paid greater attention to the management of their intellectual assets. We build a model that helps understand how licensing activity should be organized within large corporations. More specifically, we compare decentralization—where the business unit using...

Technology transfer involves more than just the permission to use knowledge covered by patents; the transfer of know-how is critical to the successful utilization of the transferred technology. However, know-how is typically difficult to codify, costly to transfer, and hence, difficult to...

Accelerating energy innovation could be an important part of an effective response to the threat of climate change. Written by a stellar group of experts in the field, this book complements existing research on the subject with an exploration of the role that public and private policy have...