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on Technology and Industrial Dynamics |
| By: | Sidney Winter |
| Abstract: | This note expounds the abstract fundamentals of the appropriability problem, re-assessing insights from three classic contributions – those of Schumpeter, Arrow and Teece. Whereas the first two contributions were explicitly concerned with the implications of appropriability for society at large, Teece’s main concern was with practical questions of business strategy and economic organization. This note argues that, his practical concerns notwithstanding, Teece contributed, en passant but fundamentally, to the clarification of basic questions that previous authors had addressed less comprehensively and less satisfactorily. Specifically, his analysis of the innovator’s access to complementary assets, undertaken from a contracting perspective, can be seen as filling a significant gap in the previous theoretical discussion of appropriability. |
| Keywords: | Appropriability, Innovation, Complementary assets, Patents, Intellectual property. |
| Date: | 2006–09–11 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ssa:lemwps:2006/21&r=tid |
| By: | Manuel Trajtenberg; Gil Shiff; Ran Melamed |
| Abstract: | The goal of this paper is to lay out a methodology and corresponding computer algorithms, that allow us to extract the detailed data on inventors contained in patents, and harness it for economic research. Patent data has long been used in empirical research in economics, and yet the information on the identity (i.e. the names and location) of the patents’ inventors has seldom been deployed in a large scale, primarily because of the “who is who” problem: the name of a given inventor may be spelled differently across her/his patents, and the exact same name may correspond to different inventors (i.e. the “John Smith” problem). Given that there are over 2 million patents with 2 inventors per patent on average, the “who is who” problem applies to over 4 million “records”, which is obviously too large to tackle manually. We have thus developed an elaborate methodology and computerized procedure to address this problem in a comprehensive way. The end result is a list of 1.6 million unique inventors from all over the world, with detailed data on their patenting histories, their employers, co-inventors, etc. Forty percent of them have more than one patent, and 70,000 have more than 10 patents. We can trace those multiple inventors across time and space, and thus study the causes and consequences of their mobility across countries, regions, and employers. Given the increasing availability of large computerized data sets on individuals, there may be plenty of opportunities to deploy this methodology to other areas of economic research as well. |
| JEL: | C81 C88 O30 O31 |
| Date: | 2006–09 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:12479&r=tid |
| By: | Bulut, Harun; Moschini, GianCarlo |
| Abstract: | In line with the rights and incentives provided by the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, U.S. universities have increased their involvement in patenting and licensing activities through their own technology transfer offices. Only a few U.S. universities are obtaining large returns, however, whereas others are continuing with these activities despite negligible or negative returns. We assess the U.S. universities’ potential to generate returns from licensing activities by modeling and estimating quantiles of the distribution of net licensing returns conditional on some of their structural characteristics. We find limited prospects for public universities without a medical school everywhere in their distribution. Other groups of universities (private, and public with a medical school) can expect significant but still fairly modest returns only beyond the 0.9th quantile. These findings call into question the appropriateness of the revenue-generating motive for the aggressive rate of patenting and licensing by U.S. universities. |
| Keywords: | Bayh-Dole Act, quantile regression, returns to innovation, skewed distributions, technology transfer, university patents. |
| Date: | 2006–09–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:isu:genres:12672&r=tid |
| By: | Dolfsma, W.; Panne, G. van der (Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), RSM Erasmus University) |
| Abstract: | In their seminal paper, Acs and Audretsch (1988) analyze innovation patterns across industries and identify several determinants of innovativeness, both positive and negative. Their work is seminal if only because of the unique data they use to measure innovativeness: new-product announcements. They show that industry concentration, degree of unionization would hamper innovation; industries characterized by increased shares of skilled labor and large firms provide favorable conditions for innovation. By analyzing a new and more consciously compiled database, we re-examine their original claims. Our results largely support the findings of Acs & Audretsch, but diverge from them in one important way. We suggest that the large firms do not contribute more to a industry?s innovativeness than small firms ? a vindication of the Schumpeter Mark I perspective. In addition, we analyze micro-level data of individual firms. Firms within different sub-groups respond differently to their competitive environment. We show that less dedicated innovators prove more susceptible to environmental factors than more committed innovators. In addition, an unfavorable competitive environment decreases the likelihood that less successful innovators will announce new products. |
| Keywords: | Innovation;New-Product Announcements;Innovation Sub-Currents;Schumpeter Mark I; |
| Date: | 2006–09–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dgr:eureri:30008873&r=tid |