Events

This study examines when and how engineers who connect to brokers who span structural holes in communication networks can improve innovative performance at their firm. Using survey data on social networks at a large B2B software company, we find that engineers who pay attention to information from brokers achieve higher innovative performance than those who pay little (or no) attention to such information. Moreover, we find that the advantage of paying attention to brokers’ information is magnified when focal engineers are embedded in highly constrained networks. Yet, our post-hoc analysis reveals that engineers normally allocate less attention to information from brokers than that from local colleagues partially because brokers’ information is perceived to be less relevant to the engineers. These findings about the crucial role of attention allocation for secondhand brokers make contributions to studies of social networks and innovation.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is now a reality in Europe. The new system for patent dispute resolution is the most significant change in the European patent landscape in decades. The court has been open since 1 June this year and is starting to hand down its first decisions. The UPC has a local division in Helsinki and a Nordic-Baltic regional division with its seat in Stockholm. Vilhelm Schröder is an experienced patent litigator from Finland and will provide insight on how the UPC is perceived particularly from a Nordic perspective.

Speaker information: Vilhelm Schröder

Registration:
Please register by 2 October 2023 to miplc@miplc.de if you intend on joining the talk in person.
In addition, the talk will be available via Zoom. Please register here in advance: Zoom Registration
 

This paper shows that gender inequality affects the extent to which scientific ideas are used to develop new technologies. Despite strong incentives to select the most promising ideas, we claim that inventors are more likely to build on men’s rather than women’s science. We exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries – i.e., instances when a man and a woman publish the same idea around the same time – and track the citations that those papers receive in patented inventions. The papers led by female scientists receive on average 40% fewer patent citations than their male-led twin. We examine several explanations for this gender gap in inventors’ attention. The pattern of results is consistent with inventors’ value expectations being a driver of the attention gap, beyond differences in the salience, overall productivity, and academic impact of scientists’ research. These findings have implications for our understanding of frictions in science-based technology development, as well as for broader theories of how gender inequality shapes cumulative innovation.

Contact person: Michael Rose

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

Reported numbers of observed scientific misconduct, e.g. through retracted articles, are increasing at an alarming rate. The detected cases, however, only present the tip of the iceberg because the actual amount of scientific misconduct is impossible to observe. Fraud in science is professionally and socially unaccepted and leads to sanctions for the culpable scientists so that misconducting scientists try to hide their fraudulent actions. This means that ultimately, the size of the population of misconducting authors remains elusive and, as such, presents a “dark number.”
We estimate the size of the population of misconducting authors in medical and health sciences, drawing on capture-recapture methods. We find that the population size of misconducting authors in medical and health sciences is about 4,000 and therewith much larger than the cases that are detected. This finding calls for more transparency through data sharing among peers and author responsibility assignment. (joint with Maikel Pellens)

Contact person: Rainer Widmann

Abstract and title will follow soon.

Contact person: Michael E. Rose

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

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) I is a technology that can create novel, original and inventive content based on users input or data. AI has become a powerful and disruptive force in various domains, especially in the pharma-biotech industry, where it can accelerate drug discovery, optimize clinical trials, and improve patient outcomes. However, the use of AI also raises complex and unresolved issues regarding patent inventorship and ownership. While some jurisdictions have explicitly excluded AI from being an inventor, there is still uncertainty on how humans can claim inventorship on the inventive contributions of AI. This presentation will explore the question of inventive contribution in an invention and its impact on inventorship from a pharma-biotech perspective. The talk further discusses how different jurisdiction’s patent law define an ‘invention’ and an ‘inventor’, and how this can address the challenges posed by AI-assisted inventions. This talk will also explore the case of the Artificial Inventor Project, and how different courts have rejected the argument of AI inventor. Finally, this talk will propose recommendations for a future framework model that addresses some of the patent inventorship and ownership issues posed by AI in the age of generative innovation.

About Pratap Devarapalli

Dr. Pratap Devarapalli MSc, LLM, PhD is an Intellectual Property Strategist and Patent researcher. He has expertise in dealing with Intellectual Property issues in relation to emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 3D bioprinting and synthetic biology. He is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at TC Bernie School of Law, University of Queensland, Australia. Pratap pursued his doctoral studies from the Centre for Law and Genetics, University of Tasmania, Australia where his research was focused on “Patenting issues related to Bioprinted tissues and Bioinks”. He was invited by Government of Japan to assist Japanese Patent Office in harmonizing of Japanese Patent Law in relation AI. He pursued his Master of Law (LLM) in Intellectual Property from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Geneva and the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is the recipient of the prestigious International Fellowship offered by WIPO. He holds a Master's degree in Genomics and a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology, Microbiology, and Chemistry. Pratap also holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Patent informatics from the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research at the CSIR Unit of Research and Development of Information Products, India and worked as a Patent researcher in the same.

Abstract follows soon.

The transfer of knowledge has not changed fundamentally for many hundreds of years: It is usually document-based-formerly printed on paper as a classic essay and nowadays as PDF. With around 2.5 million new research contributions every year, researchers drown in a flood of pseudo-digitized PDF publications. As a result research and innovation is seriously weakened. We argue for representing research contributions in a structured and semantic way as a knowledge graph. The advantage is that information represented in a knowledge graph is readable by machines and humans. As an example, we give an overview on the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG), a service implementing this approach. For creating the knowledge graph representation, we rely on a mixture of manual (crowd/expert sourcing) and (semi-)automated techniques. Only with such a combination of human and machine intelligence, we can achieve the required quality of the representation to allow for novel exploration and assistance services for researchers. As a result, a scholarly knowledge graph such as the ORKG can be used to give a condensed overview on the state-of-the-art addressing a particular research quest, for example as a tabular comparison of contributions according to various characteristics of the approaches. Further possible intuitive access interfaces to such scholarly knowledge graphs include domain-specific (chart) visualizations or answering of natural language questions.

Contact person:  Marina Chugunova

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

Data is a central resource of and multiple-use production factor in the 21^st century. Data creation, data processing, data use, and data transfer is – in the words of data geopolitics – inherently linked to the competitiveness of not only economies, but also of societies. Nevertheless, the quest for an adequate and balanced governance framework is on-going – whereby data governance does not only, but also encompasses hard and soft law regulation. The respective field of data law is emerging and not yet fully ‘surveyed’, still in the process of making as well as fragmented along the lines of existing rules and recent policy efforts. The legal (and infrastructural) taxonomy is in flux and an inherent element of modern-day data strategies worldwide.

Underlining this global nature of data governance, the conference is aimed at a truly global view on data law instruments – where the current EU pieces of legislation (inter alia the General Data Protection Regulation as well as the Data Governance Act and the proposed Data Act) are only one of many approaches. Most important, the conference is devoted to a contextual – and a decolonial comparative law – approach to data regulation – including cultural, economic, and infrastructural dimensions of data governance and linking perspectives from the global north and global south as well from liberal and authoritarian settings.

The conference is co-organised by the University of Passau Research Centre for Law and Digitalisation (FREDI) and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. The event is the final part of a three-tier conference series on Global Data Law and element of a greater research agenda with respect to Global Data Law & Policy.

Visit the website on the Conference Series on Global Data Law.
 

Programme as pdf

Registration is open up to and including 26 November 2023.

Abstract and title will follow soon.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

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