While often presumed in academic literature and policy discussions there is little empirical evidence showing that academic patents protect more basic inventions than corporate patents. This study provides new evidence on the basicness of academic patents using German professor patents linked to...

The knowledge produced by academic scientists has been identified as a potential key driver of technological progress. Recent policies in Europe aim at increasing commercially orientated activities in academe. Based on a sample of German scientists across all fields of science we investigate the...

This paper describes and analyzes the occurrence and extent of oppositions initiated against plant biotechnology patents granted by the European Patent Office (EPO). The opposition mechanism is a legal procedure that allows any third party to challenge the validity of patents awarded by the EPO....

This study investigates whether standard patent measures for the importance and basicness of patents are able to distinguish between 'wacky' patents and a control group of randomly drawn patents. Our findings show that forward citations are good predictors of importance. However, the 'wacky'...

The knowledge produced by academic scientists has been identified as a potential key driver of technological progress. Recent policies in Europe aim at increasing commercially orientated activities in academe. Based on a sample of German scientists across all fields of science, we investigate...

Knowledge transfer from science to industry has been shown to be beneficial for the corporate partner. In order to get a better understanding of the reasons behind these positive effects, this study focuses on the junction of science and industry by comparing characteristics of academic...