International R&D activities have grown significantly over the last two decades. Both the number of actors involved, as well as the importance of the technological activity carried out abroad, has considerably increased. We aim to quantify the international generation of knowledge for the case...

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...

This paper aims at assessing the direct and total (direct, indirect and induced) impact of the Belgian air industry (BAI). The empirical analysis shows that in 2003 the ten largest Belgian airlines had about 4.300 employees. The "indirect" and "induced" effects of these airlines activities...

This paper presents a critical survey on macro and micro levels studies that evaluate the impact of foreign R&D on domestic productivity growth in industrialized countries. Although the available studies converge towards the conclusion that significant international spillovers take place, we...

The present paper discusses the role of quality in patent examination process from the perspective of patent offices' behavior and organization. After documenting original stylized facts, the paper presents a model in which patent offices set patent fees and the quality level of their...

Despite the growing interest in university-to-industry technology transfer, there are very few studies on the governance of universities’ technology transfer offices (TTOs). The few existing ones tend to focus on U.S. universities and generally tackle one dimension of the governance. The...

This paper decomposes the R&D-patent relationship at the industry level to shed light on thesources of the worldwide surge in patent applications. The empirical analysis is based on aunique dataset that includes 5 patent indicators computed for 18 industries in 19 countriescovering the period...

This paper describes a new patent-based indicator of inventive activity. The indicator is based on counting all the priority patent applications filed by a country’s inventors, regardless of the patent office in which the application is filed, and can therefore be considered as a complete...

Why does society allow, or even encourage, private appropriation of inventions? When do patents encourage competition, when do they hamper it? How should society design the compromise between the interest of the inventor and the interest of the users of patented inventions? How should the patent...