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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.

In a complex and dynamic technological environment, firms are often unable to sustain continuous high levels of productivity over long periods of time without accessing knowledge from beyond their boundaries; even leading firms require external knowledge to develop new innovations.  In the pharmaceutical industry, for instance, an increasing proportion of firm revenue is generated from products derived from technology discovered outside the firm. Ceccagnoli et al. (2010) support this notion: in 60 percent of new branded drugs introduced over a 20-year period, more than half of the patents protecting them originated outside the firm.  More specifically, Edwards et al. (2003) report that virtually all drugs with biotechnology origins emanate, in fact, from universities.  It is likely, however, that this dependence is understated because the analysis focused only on patents attached to new products identified in the FDA Orange Book.  Nonetheless, it demonstrates the critical importance placed on the supply of new technologies through the earlier stages of the external research value chain.

Our focus is on the flow of technologies out of university (non-profit) labs to biotechnology firms and from there on to pharmaceutical firms. Given that few biotechnology firms have the resources and complementary assets to fully develop products it is expected that most externally generated products will pass through this downstream gateway. More specifically, we focus not only on the supply of projects from universities to biotechnology firms but also on the supply of projects that make it to the second link between biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms and, more importantly, several underlying characteristics of these inventions (e.g., stage of development, disease category and NIH funding).

When licensed to firms, university biotechnology inventions are typically very early stage. As such, technical development is necessary before the invention can be marketed. The uncertainty typically discussed is either technological uncertainty (that is, will the invention work) or market uncertainty (that is, will the product be profitable). We demonstrate in this paper that a third type of uncertainty, entrepreneurial uncertainty) is also very important. Entrepreneurial uncertainty is uncertainty as to the applicability of the invention (the application for which it is, in fact, useful--in this context, disease category). For example, a technology might be license from the university to the biotechnology firm for use in cancer, but when sublicensed to a second firm, the disease category might be cardiovascular.

In this paper we examine changes in the stage of development and disease indication from initial to sublicense. We estimate econometric models explaining whether a licensed inventions is sublicensed as well as the time between the patent priority date and the initial license and the time between the initial license to sublicense. Independent variables include stage of development, disease category, license characteristics (exclusivity, payment terms, etc.), National Institutes of Health funding, etc.

Trademarks (TMs) shape the competitive landscape of markets for goods and services in all countries through branding and conveying information and quality inherent in products. Yet, researchers are largely unable to conduct rigorous empirical analysis of TMs in the global economy because TM data and economic data are organized differently and cannot be analyzed jointly at the industry or sector level. We propose an ‘Algorithmic Links with Probabilities’ (ALP) approach to match TM data to economic data and enable these data to speak to each other. Specifically, we construct a NICE Class Level concordance that maps TM data into trade and industry categories forward and backward. This concordance allows researchers to analyze differences in TM usage across concordance for TMs to characterize patterns in TM applications across countries and industries. We use the concordance to investigate some of the key determinants of international technology transfer by comparing bilateral TM applications and bilateral patent applications. We find that international patenting and TM strategies largely conform with domestic patterns with significant differences in intellectual property usage across sectors. We conclude with a discussion of possible extensions of this work, including deeper indicator-level concordances and further analyses that are possible once TM data are linked with economic activity data.

While Schumpeter is the most quoted author in ongoing academic debates on innovation and entrepreneurship, those who cite him almost always catch the letter, but miss the spirit, of his work. This is especially true for his early writings. My aim is to strip away some conventional ideas about what should count as "Schumpeterian", or "Neo-Schumpeterian" -- in order to reveal again Schumpeter as a radical thinker -- and to argue why he is still, after more than 100 years, the best starting point by far today for anyone wanting to understand what I call "deep innovation".

Cumulative innovation is a driving force of economic growth. Access costs, the time and effort scientists need to devote to understand existing knowledge, may potentially hinder new innovation. I examine the effect of a decrease in access costs resulting from the adoption of a data reporting standard Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment (MIAME) on subsequent life sciences research. I take advantage of a natural experiment to implement a difference-in-differences estimate of MIAME on subsequent use of data in journal publications. The results show that microarray data submitted after journal adopts MIAME is at least 50 percent more likely to be reused. Overall, the evidence suggests that the decline of access costs due to data reporting standards is important for the accumulation of knowledge in the life sciences.

Founders’ interpretive schemes affect emerging organizations in fundamental ways, because they provide  the cognitive lens through which founders define the purposes and critical features of their organizations. By conducting an in-depth, qualitative study of the emergence process of 25 technology ventures, we extend prior work in several ways. First, we show how founders diverge in the scope of their interpretive schemes, as some make sense of their firms in a narrow way (focused on one organizational path), whereas others view their firms through either a broad lens (variety generating, experimentation with multiple paths) or vague lens (variety generating, exploration of multiple paths). Second, we find that differences in the scope of founders’ interpretive schemes have important ramifications for both the organizational emergence process (because the founders’ schemes become embodied in their organizations’ structures) and its outcomes (because new organizations first need to find “fertile ground” that allows them to become viable entities). In particular, our results show that ventures established on the basis of broad and vague interpretive schemes will possess greater ability to change and adapt over time – which is of importance because most firms in our sample had to engage in fundamental re-orientation within three years after founding – and that the former can make greater progress on their journey to viable organizations than the narrow or vague types. These results help to advance theory on organizational emergence, and provide key insights to recent discussions about the role of experimentation in entrepreneurship.

Nikolaus Thumm is chairman of the European Commision Expert Group on Patent Aggregation. This group was convened by the European Commission to investigate whether there is a need for a European Commission intervention to foster the development of IP markets, in particular through aggregation of patents, with a focus on patent pools and funds. The premise is that some patents would be more valuable, or would be more likely to be used, if they were aggregated, that is, if patents belonging to different owners were gathered together in such a way that single entities or groups could act as licensors of all the patents, or of as many of them as might attract the attention of potential licensees. The development of the market in patents and licences should be understood as the enhanced application of patents and licences to drive innovation as well as maximise returns to entities that are actively engaged in R&D, in particular small and medium sized entities, that may not have the marketing and legal potential to fully exploit and enforce their individual or limited number of patents.