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By linking an open innovation perspective and a contingency view, this paper contributes to the open innovation literature in two ways. First, answering the recent call of scholars, we bring environmental context into open innovation research. In line with a ‘fit as moderation’ perspective we claim that some environmental contingencies might be favorable for searching broadly, but less favorable for searching deeply. To the best of our knowledge this is the first empirical study that explicitly focuses on specific contingencies in the external environment that shape firms’ ability to benefit from open innovation. Second, rather than treating search openness as a homogeneous construct, we explicitly focus on the differential effects of breadth and depth on firms’ innovation performance. As we will show, this approach delivers a more fine-grained understanding of how contingencies affect the value of external search breadth and depth and their differential impact on innovation performance.

Using a novel panel data set of Japanese inventors, we investigate how monetary incentives affect corporate inventors' behavior and performance. Furthermore, we analyze how these incentives interact with intrinsic motivation. Our findings are as follows: (1) While introducing or raising revenue-based payments is associated with higher patent quality, such schemes decrease the number of citations to non-patent literature; (2) the strength of intrinsic motivation - measured by the importance of the inventors’ interest in contributing to the advancement of science (“taste for science” hereafter) - raises the inventors' patent productivity; and (3) the taste for science weakens the marginal effect of monetary incentives on inventive productivity, and further reinforces the negative effect of monetary incentives on the inventors’ backward citations from non-patent literature.

We present an empirical analysis of the effects of patent thickets at the European Patent Office on entry into patenting by UK firms. Using a direct measure of patent thicket density, we provide evidence for the existence and growth of patent thickets in specific industries, notably in telecommunications, audiovisual technology, and computer technology. Our analysis indicates that the density of patent thickets is associated with reduced entry into patenting in the particular technology area (controlling for the level of patenting in that area). We find this effect to be particularly pronounced for electronics and telecommunications. It is also stronger for smaller than for large companies.

A question of considerable interest in a world of tightened resources is the relationship between research outputs to research inputs. At the national level, policy makers want to know the degree to which more funding leads to more research. At the micro level, funding agencies want to know the degree to which research can be attributed to the funds invested in researchers. These types of questions are sometimes answered by relating the amount of direct funding investigators receive from a foundation or agency to the number of articles published in the next two or three years.

The approach of relating publications to agency funding (PAF) highlights two issues encountered in examining the relationship between research inputs and outputs. The first is one of attribution: exactly which articles should be attributed to what funding stream? In the PAF approach all articles published in the next few years are attributed to total agency funding received in a given year. Yet some articles undoubtedly result from funding received prior to the year being studied while others relate to funding received in future years.  The PAF approach also assumes that all articles can be attributed to funding from one agency. Yet many researchers have funding from more than one agency.

The PAF approach also assumes that the manner in which funding is bundled has no effect on the productivity of the lab. There are two dimensions to this neutrality assumption. First, it assumes that it makes no difference whether a principal investigator (PI) has four grants a year that sum to $1million or one grant for $1 million. Second, the PAF approach implicitly assumes that output is unrelated to the composition of the funding portfolio in terms of the relative size of each grant.

The presented paper by Michele Pezzoni (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland), Jacques Mairesse (CREST-ENSAE, France, UNU-Merit, the Netherlands, and NBER), Paula Stephan (Georgia State University and NBER), and Julia Lane (American Institutes of Research) investigates the attribution and neutrality issues, using data from the California Institute of Technology for the period 2000-2010. Our data are fine-grained and allow us to observe the size of the award, the source of the funding, and the length of funding at the PI level, thus creating a panel data base with three dimensions: PI, grant and time. We measure research productivity in terms of publication counts (QUANTITY) and the average Impact Factor of the journals in which the publications are published (QUALITY).

We find that the relationship between inputs and outputs persists after addressing attribution issues and estimating the relationship at the grant level. The simulations we run provide evidence that the neutrality assumption does not hold and that productivity increases the more highly concentrated is the PI’s grant portfolio. This is consistent with the presence of economies of scale in grant administration. It is also consistent with the fact that grants of small size are used to support more risky research agendas.

We outline a set of steps that could lead to new quantitative analysis and understanding of science policy based on scientifically grounded conceptual framework and large-scale computational analysis of scientific activity. Getting the right conceptual and empirical framework matters, lest resources and people get squandered because incentives are wrong. Getting an empirical framework based on something other than anecdotes matters, to avoid substantive misunderstandings about the process of science. Seizing the opportunity presented by the explosion in digital information about research products and processes, will require both substantial effort to acquire, integrate, curate, and evolve large quantities of information from many sources, and much innovation in both science policy research and computational methods.

In this paper, we design two laboratory experiments to analyze the causal effects of competition on step-by-step innovation. Innovations result from costly R&D investments and move technology up one step. Competition is inversely measured by the ex post rents for firms that operate at the same technological level, i.e. for neck-and-neck firms. First, we find that increased competition leads to a significant increase in R&D investments by neck-and-neck firms. Second, increased competition decreases R&D investments by firms that are lagging behind, in particular if the time horizon is short. Third, we find that increased competition affects industry composition by reducing the fraction of sectors where firms are neck-and-neck. All these results are consistent with the predictions of step-by-step innovation models.

Current economic analyses of intellectual property regimes on international trade reveal ambiguous results, suggesting a general positive impact on trade flows but with strong dependence on the status of trade openness, national innovation system, qualitative development level of industrial structures or the focussed industrial sectors. This project targets on the analysis of factors which influence the impact of intellectual property on international trade competitiveness of economies, industrial sectors or enterprises. It focuses on the integrated analysis of relevant determinants in four areas: 1. factors of national innovation system, 2. structures of intellectual property protection policies and strategies applied by economic subjects, 3. factors of innovation and competition conduct, and 4. factors of competitive position in international trade. The project analyses export orientated sectors of the German economy at the aggregated national and disaggregated sectoral level and selected multinational enterprises between 2004 and 2014.

We know little about the effects of patent licensing because licensing information is notoriously difficult to find. Using publicly available data we construct a novel means of indirectly identifying academic patents that have been licensed to large corporations. We estimate the signaling effects of patent licensing on subsequent innovation. We find that after licensing patents have considerably more citations. The signaling effect of licensing by universities with a large flow of patents is similar for public and private universities. For universities with a small flow of patents, relative to Small public universities, a license of a patent owned by a private university to a large company leads to significantly more citations. The results suggest that licensing of small private university patents sends significantly stronger and more informative signal to out-of-state innovators who, influenced by the perceptions about university technology management practices across different types of universities, might be generally suspicious about the quality and potential of patents owned by small private universities.