Institute News

The prize, endowed with EUR 1,000, is conferred annually by a scientific committee composed of five prominent Italian antitrust professionals, three officers and two lawyers, for the best dissertation in the area of competition and consumer law.

The award is just one of the initiatives of the association, all of which are devoted to promoting excellence in antitrust education and practice in the memory of Elena Messina. Messina, a young and promising lawyer who graduated summa cum laude from LUISS University with a dissertation on efficiency and consumer welfare in EU and US anti-monopoly laws, died in 2012 in a road accident. She was working for the Italian Antitrust Authority at the time.

Galli was presented with the prize by the Vice President of the Association, Filippo Alberti, on 28 September 2017 at the seat of the Antitrust Authority in Rome during the conference “Competition issues related to the freedom to connect”.

The subject of Tomadas’ work will be “The impact of the Unified Patent Court on innovative start-ups in the European Single Market”, while Galli will examine “Predatory patent litigation in the European competition law context” and Zafrilla will devote his research to the question “Essential patents over-declaration in standards: An anticompetitive conduct?”

The European Intellectual Property Institutes Network, or EIPIN, a network founded in 1999 to intensify the cooperation between European institutions in the area of intellectual property and their students, joined the competition for funding from the EU Horizon 2020 program in early 2016. Its concept, “Innovation Society” was awarded funding in May 2016 for a European Joint Doctorate with a proposal to examine the effects of proprietary rights on the innovation potential of a society and to answer the question how such rights must be designed in order to facilitate, and not hamper, innovation.

A total of 15 doctoral candidates were accepted into the program, which will receive funding in the amount of 3.8 million euros over a four-year period. Each EIPIN member institution will supervise three of its own candidates while functioning as a co-supervisor of three of the other EIPIN members‘ candidates. As a part of the doctoral program, candidates are to complete internships at top European organisations in innovative branches (including telecommunications, music and seeds) and take part in seminars (e.g. on scientific working methods).

EIPIN’s members are the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (MIPLC), Queen Mary University of London, University of Strasbourg (CEIPI), Alicante University and Maastricht University. The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, which was involved in the funding application as a supporting institution and which is one of the pillars of the MIPLC, will collaborate with the University of Augsburg in implementing the program and will also supervise doctoral candidates.

Arnold Picot was Professor Emeritus of the Munich School of Management (LMU Munich), where he taught and carried out his research since 1987. He was a close friend to the institute as well as a committed supporter, teacher, advisor, and mentor to many colleagues and students. He was one of the initiators of the International Max Planck Research School for Competition and Innovation (IMPRS-CI) which marks a first significant step towards the establishment of the department for Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research. Since 2014, he was a member of the Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition.

The institute has lost a well-respected and warm-hearted colleague. He will be sadly missed and held in grateful memory.
 

With the workshop series the Institute seeks, first, to discuss with experts and practitioners in which direction the Internet of Things will develop with regard to standardization, and second, to identify the economic and regulatory implications of those changes.

The workshop focused on connectivity standards enabling interoperability between multiple devices and across different communication networks. It consisted of three distinct panels:

• Technology and Market Landscape: The objective of this panel was to get insights from indus-try representatives on the evolving landscape of current and future technologies providing machine to machine communication as well as on how the IoT is changing the business and market environment, both in general and with regard to the IoT connectivity market.
• Standardization Landscape: Representatives of different standard setting organizations, industry consortia and technology companies explained the current stage of standardization activities in the field of IoT connectivity. Beyond this mapping exercise, more fundamental questions were addressed, such as how technology and market complexity affect the standardization process and what are the optimal roles of standard setting organizations, industry allianc-es and stakeholder groups in the IoT standard development.
• IPRs Landscape: IP lawyers from different stakeholders presented their views on the role that Intellectual Property Rights will play in the IoT context and, more specifically, on the challenges that the increased need for connectivity and interoperability creates with regard to access to patented standardized technology.

The presentations and discussions at the workshop provided useful insights for the assessment and analysis of the economic, legal and regulatory implications of standardization in the field of IoT con-nectivity. Among them, the event’s organizers, Dr. Beatriz Conde Gallego and Dr. Fabian Gaessler of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, highlighted that “the need for wide common standards is less pronounced at the connectivity level than at higher levels (e.g. semantic interoperability), mainly because no single connectivity technology will be able to satisfy all industry needs. Various connectivity standards will coexist and complement each other in the future. At the same time, a successful implementation of these standards will certainly require transparent, predictable and flexible licensing schemes which reflect the heterogeneous conditions of IoT applications and the diversity of stakeholders involved in the IoT value chain.”

See Program

The Max Planck Society awards the prize, endowed with EUR 7,500, with the intention to motivate talented junior scientists and researchers to pursue a future research career.

Fabian Gaessler’s thesis is dedicated to the empirical study of the enforcement and trade of patent rights in Europe. The means available to an inventor to enforce his exclusive right against others and/or to sell his protected idea represent fundamental preconditions for a functioning patent system, and ultimately for incentivizing innovation. Fabian Gaessler uses quantitative methods to address inter alia the question as to what extent the current institutional design in Germany is conducive to patent enforcement and whether it qualifies as a blueprint for a European unified system.

Since 1978, the Max Planck Society honors up to 30 young scientists and researchers every year with the Otto Hahn Medal for outstanding scientific achievement - to date, more than 940 scientists and researchers.

The paper examines the impact and signaling effects of crowdfinancing on subsequent venture capital funding rounds. Drawing on a choice experimental research design the author finds causal evidence that crowdfunding – relative to other prefunding sources – is often a negative signal for professional venture investors, but that the “crowd” can nonetheless and under certain circumstances send positive signals increasing the likelihood of subsequent financing rounds.

The workshop focused on four areas:

• Legal Aspects: Union-wide IP Rights plus Copyrights: The Status Quo including the Role of the ECJ (chair: Matthias Leistner); Patents: The Status Quo including EPO and UPC and the Role of the ECJ (chair: Axel Metzger),
• Empirical Insights (chair: Annette Kur): EU Trade Mark Infringement Litigation; Patent Litigation,
• Deficits and Perspectives in the Jurisdiction of IP Rights (chair: Paul Torremans), and
• Conclusions: In Need of a Grand Design? (chair: Reto Hilty).

The purpose of the event with 40 experts from Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Denmark, Poland, Austria, the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the United States, was to identify deficits and research perspectives for further developing the EU jurisdiction scheme.

The event's organizers, Roland Knaak and Roberto Romandini of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, summed up the results: “EU jurisdiction varies widely in its approach to the intellectual property rights. Union-wide jurisdiction is only provided under certain circumstances. For the existing unitary IP Rights, especially trademarks and designs, the Regulations on these rights transfer jurisdiction to the national courts of the Member States, which in certain cases have Union-wide competence. The remaining problems with a Union-wide enforcement of these rights could be mitigated, and possibly overcome, by including further substantive provisions in the Regulations. For European patents with or without unitary effect, the UPC model aiming at establishing Union-wide jurisdiction has been put into question by Great Britain’s impending exit from the EU. Much is still uncertain, and some legal questions concerning the UK´s UPCA membership can only be clearly resolved by the CJEU. As regards copyright law, different models for further developing jurisdiction are conceivable. The options range from shifting the competence to interpret EU copyright provisions from the CJEU to the General Court and limiting the CJEU´s function to questions of primary law, to the establishment of a unitary copyright and EU specialized courts in the sense of the TFEU. A uniform and overarching structure of jurisdiction for all European IP rights is not emerging. It will be the task of fundamental research to work on a model that is capable of consensus.”

See Program

The prize, endowed with 500 Euro, is granted by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology together with the Leuphana Research Center for Entrepreneurship.

The paper examines the impact and signaling effects of crowdfinancing on subsequent venture capital funding rounds. Drawing on a choice experimental research design the author finds causal evidence that crowdfunding – relative to other prefunding sources – is often interpreted as a negative signal by professional venture investors, but that the “crowd” can nonetheless and under certain circumstances send positive signals increasing the likelihood of subsequent financing rounds.

The purpose of the event, which was organized jointly with the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova and whose participants included 20 political and research experts from Germany, Austria, Sweden, Finland, The Netherlands and Great Britain, was to exchange views on current experience with the growing numbers of new initiatives in different countries on open and user innovation policy. One focal point of the workshop was new approaches in innovation policy, including how to involve individual users and households, as important sources of innovation, in innovation policy. A further meeting is planned for July 2017 in Innsbruck, Austria.

Professor Dietmar Harhoff, Director at the Max Planck Institute that hosted the event, summed up the results: „We discovered that we can learn a lot from each country’s experiences. The processes of innovation are changing rapidly. The group of those who are actively shaping innovation processes is becoming larger and more diverse. A central question, both for innovation research and for policymaking, is what drives this increasing complexity in innovation processes and how can we put its potential to good use. We will continue to pursue this topic avidly.“

The Commission of Experts for Research and Innovation (Expertenkommission Forschung und Innovation - EFI) provides scientific advice to the German Federal Government and periodically delivers reports on research, innovation and technological productivity in Germany. A key task is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the German innovation system in an international comparison. Furthermore, Germany's perspectives as a location for research and innovation are evaluated on the basis of the latest research findings. EFI presents proposals for national research and innovation policy.