Events

The workshop will cover the MSI’s three focus areas:

• Digitalization, Strategy and Organization
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship
• Law & Economics of Intellectual Property, Innovation & Digitalization

Like the Munich Summer Institute, the MSI Ph.D. Workshop will focus on quantitative empirical research. In the workshop, participants will present their working papers, receive comments from senior scholars, and discuss their papers with other participants. The number of participants is limited. Discussants will be senior scholars who participate in the Munich Summer Institute’s main conference.

Program

The Munich Summer Institute (MSI) is hosted by the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich, University of Lausanne, Cornell University, the Chair for Technology and Innovation Management at TUM, the Chair for Economics of Innovation at TUM, the Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization (ISTO) at the LMU Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition.

Further information on the website of the MSI.

More Information: https://startupinitiative.maxplanckfoundation.org/start-up-school/

Pratap Devarapalli, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow, TC Bernie School of Law, University of Queensland, Australia, who visited the Institute as a guest researcher in 2024 , will present his recently published book on Bioinked Boundaries: Is 3D Bioprinting Innovation Falling Down at the Patentability Hurdle?

In his talk Dr. Devarapalli will especially emphasize the EU perspective.

Moderation: Prof. Dr. Hanns Ullrich

Abstract:
3D bioprinting, the fabrication of living tissues and organs using bioinks and additive manufacturing - is revolutionizing medicine but raises critical challenges for intellectual property (IP) systems. This presentation draws on Devarapalli's recent book, Bioinked Boundaries (Springer 2025), that analyse how patent laws in the US, Europe, and Australia address bioprinting inventions such as bioinks and bioprinted tissues. Through comparative doctrinal and empirical analysis of relevant provisions, case law and patent prosecution data, the talk will highlight the diverging thresholds for “patentable subject matter” across these jurisdictions and their implications for innovation, policy, and global harmonization.

More information will follow soon.

Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

Open source is key to innovation yet is assumed to be done largely through intrinsic motivation. How can we incentivize it? In this paper, we examine the impact of a program providing monetary incentives to motivate innovators to contribute to open source. The Sponsors program was introduced by GitHub in May 2019 and enabled organizations and individuals alike to pay developers for their open source work. We study this program by collecting fine-grained data on nearly 100,000 GitHub users, their activities, and sponsorship events. We first, using a difference-in-differences approach, document two main effects. One, developers who opted into the program, an action that does not itself entail a financial reward, increased their output after the program’s launch. Two, the actual receipt of a financial sponsorship has a long-lasting negative effect on two measures of innovation –repository creation and community-oriented tasks– but not in coding effort. Despite a net positive effect on innovation, sponsorship appears to crowd out intrinsic motivation, shifting effort toward self-promoting activities. Results from a pre-registered survey and experiment reinforce these findings, showing that modest sponsorship (USD 20) deters collaborative contributions compared to no compensation, larger rewards (USD 1000), or company sponsorships.

Contact person: Daehyun Kim

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Title and abstract will follow soon.

Contact person: Malte Toetzke

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Title and abstract will follow.

Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

On 15/16 December 2025, the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition will host the 8^th Research on Innovation, Science and Entrepreneurship Workshop (RISE8), an annual workshop for Ph.D. students and Junior Postdocs in Economics and Management. 

The goal of the RISE8 Workshop is to stimulate an in-depth discussion of a select number of empirical research papers. It offers Ph.D. students and Junior Postdocs an opportunity to present their work and to receive feedback.

Keynote speaker of the RISE8 Workshop is Matt Marx (Cornell University)

Get the Call for Papers RISE8.

For more information see RISE Workshop.