This paper analyzes the effects of mixed public-private Ramp;D incentives and empirically tests whether patents that were publicly sponsored are more quot;importantquot; than non-subsidized ones. Blending patents and public subsidies will allow the funding agency to subsidize inventions that...

Recent policy initiatives in the EU aim at supporting so-called young highly innovative companies (YICs). This article provides empirical evidence from German CIS data on the innovative performances of this specific type of firms, supporting why they matter. We first characterize YICs in the...

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,...

This paper studies the behavior of firms facing the decision to create a patent fence, defined as a patent portfolio of substitutable technologies. We set up a patent race model, where firms can decide either to patent their inventions, or to rely on secrecy. It is shown that firms build patent...

Against the background of the so-called "European paradox", i.e. the conjecture that EU countries lack the capability to transfer science into commercial innovations, knowledge transfer from academia to industry has been a central issue in policy debates recently. Based on a sample of German...

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...