Events

The research project integrates the following three areas: 1. IP strategy including IP investment (patenting, trademark registration) and its enforcement, 2. marketing strategy including market expansion path and market selection, and 3. technology management. The case study covers companies from the US, China, Japan, and Germany.

We measure the size of knowledge spillovers of R&D activities done by venture capital financed start-ups and compare them quantitatively to spillovers of conventional corporate R&D. We suggest a novel measure to identify the appropriate spillover pool based on backward citations which reflect learning between firms. Using panel data of U.S. firms we show that venture capital financed R&D generates significant spillovers on the patent production of other firms. Counterfactual estimates suggest that the spillovers generated by VC-financed firms are more than 50% larger than those generated by established companies. We address potential endogeneity concerns with an instrumental variable strategy using changes in federal and state tax incentives as instrumental variable for R&D and past fund raising as instrument for venture capital investment.

Sellers often seek intermediaries that can help them develop their products and market them to buyers. Sellers prefer intermediaries that have great market access, so that they can reach buyers, and where they have a high relative standing, so that they receive greater resources from the intermediary. However, these criteria are conflicting. A seller often needs to choose either an intermediary with limited market access, where it has a high relative standing (“big fish, little pond”), or an intermediary with great market access, where it has a low relative standing (“little fish, big pond”). I study how sellers resolve this dilemma by examining how 419 video game developers choose among 178 video game publishers over a nine-year period. I find that sellers’ resolutions of the dilemma are contingent on their own characteristics and on characteristics of the intermediaries. In particular, I find that sellers’ preferences shift towards great market access when they have more experience or a higher proportion of derivative products, but that they shift towards high relative standing when the competition among the sellers in the intermediary’s portfolio escalates due to a larger portfolio size or increased seller overlap.

Post-grant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring post-grant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are caught up in patent thickets. Using data on opposition against patents at the European Patent Office we show that opposition decreases in fields in which many others profit from patent revocations. Moreover, in fields with a large number of mutually blocking patents the incidence of opposition is sharply reduced, particularly among large firms and firms that are caught up directly in patent thickets. These findings indicate that post-grant patent review may not constitute an effective correction device for erroneous patent grants in technologies affected by either patent thickets or highly dispersed patent ownership.

Recent research on the economics of patents is surveyed. The topics covered include theoretical and empirical evidence on patents as incentives for innovation, the effectiveness of patents for invention disclosure, patent valuation, and the design of patent systems. We also look at some current policy areas, including software and business method patents, university patenting, and the growth in patent litigation.

We use a rich longitudinal dataset on department-level productivity in a contemporary field of science to identify and decompose the causal impact of hiring a star on local knowledge production. Specifically, we estimate the relative roles of knowledge spillovers versus recruiting externalities as they affect co-located researchers who are related or unrelated to the star in idea space. Hiring a star does not increase overall incumbent productivity, but this aggregate effect hides off setting effects on colleagues who are related (positive) versus unrelated (negative). Star hires improve subsequent joiner quality for both related and unrelated scientists, although the effect is significantly larger for related scientists. The overall positive impact of the star on department-level productivity is mainly due to joiner-quality effects. Furthermore, the productivity impact is more pronounced at mid- and lower-ranked institutions, suggesting implications for the optimal spatial organization of science and university strategies aimed at ascending departmental rankings.