Recent years have seen large-scale litigation of standard-essential patents between companies like Apple, Samsung, Google, Motorola and Microsoft. Such patents are particular because they are, by definition, indispensable to any company wishing to implement a technical standard. Firms that do...

Historical accounts describe numerous cases of parallel invention. Nowadays, with over half a million inventions yearly that apply for patent protection at the USPTO alone, it is likely that there are a lot of parallel inventions among these. Yet, the mechanisms behind creating similar knowledge...