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The use of debt to finance risky entrepreneurial-firm projects is rife with informational and contracting problems. Nonetheless, we document widespread lending to startups in three innovation-intensive sectors and in early stages of development. At odds with claims that the secondary patent market is too illiquid to shape debt financing, we find that intensified patent trading increases the annual rate of startup lending, particularly for startups with more redeployable (less firm-specific) patent assets. Exploiting differences in venture capital (VC) fundraising cycles and a negative capital-supply shock in early 2000, we also find that the credibility of VC commitments to refinance and grow fledgling companies is vital for such lending. Our study illuminates friction-reducing mechanisms in the market for venture lending, a surprisingly active but opaque arena for innovation financing, and tests central tenets of contract theory.

Bruno Lasserre is a member of the Conseil d’État, the French supreme administrative court, which he joined in 1978 after graduating from École Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the French national school for civil service.

Between 1989 and 1997, he served as Director for Regulatory Affairs, and then Director General for Posts and Telecommunications at the French Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. In this position, he developed and implemented a comprehensive overhaul of the telecommunications sector, culminating in its full opening to competition as well as in the creation of an independent regulator.

He returned to the Conseil d’État in 1998, where he chaired the 1st Chamber for three years, before becoming Deputy Chairman for all litigation activities, between 2002 and 2004.

After serving as Member of the board of the Conseil de la concurrence (1998-2004), he was appointed President in July 2004, and in this capacity pushed through a major reform that transformed it into the Autorité de la concurrence, responsible for merger review and competition advocacy in addition to antitrust enforcement. He has chaired the Autorité since then.

He is also an Officer of the French Légion d’honneur and a Commander of the French Ordre national du Mérite.

Die Einladung zum Vortrag finden Sie hier.

The next Institute Seminar will take place on Tuesday, February 10, 2015, at 6 pm in room E 10 of the main building.

Sunimal Mendis will give a talk on "Copyright, Digitization and the Public Domain: Is there a need for exclusive rights over digitized versions of rare public domain material in Europe?" Alina Wernick will moderate.

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.