Publications

15 Jan 2013
First Look

First Look: January 15

circumscribe citizen-employees, and they engage in production and trade. But individual corporations are no longer adequate to serve as the primary unit of analysis. Over the years, systems of distributed innovation-so-called business ecosystems-have become... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

20 Aug 2014
Research & Ideas

Dragging Patent Trolls Into the Light

The Texas town of Marshall has a population of 25,000 people, 2,000 of whom are students attending one of the four colleges that have earned Marshall the nickname "Athens of Texas." Marshall is also home to a historic pottery View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Legal Services

17 Aug 2011
Research & Ideas

Protecting against the Pirates of Bollywood

middle class, and the fact that India's film industry sold 3.2 billion tickets in 2009. “Movie piracy in India is rampant—you can get one online the day after a release” Harvard Business School Associate Professor Lakshmi Iyer, a native... View Details

Keywords: by Kim Girard; Motion Pictures & Video

04 Oct 2004
What Do You Think?

Does Speed Trump Intellectual Property?

these responses, is the value of intellectual property in all but a few instances or industries vastly overrated? Is the appropriate response to this dilemma to rethink processes to achieve speed as both a... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

March 2022
Article

Winner Takes All? Tech Clusters, Population Centers, and the Spatial Transformation of U.S. Invention

By: Brad Chattergoon and William R. Kerr

U.S. invention has become increasingly concentrated around major tech centers since the 1970s, with implications for how much cities across the country share in concomitant local benefits. Is invention becoming a winner-takes-all race? We explore the rising spatial... View Details

Keywords: Clusters; Invention; Agglomeration; Artificial Intelligence; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Applications and Software; Industry Clusters; AI and Machine Learning

Find at Harvard

Summer 2020
Article

Tech Clusters

By: William R. Kerr and Frederic Robert-Nicoud

Tech clusters like Silicon Valley play a central role for modern innovation, business competitiveness, and economic performance. This paper reviews what constitutes a tech cluster, how they function internally, and the degree to which policy makers can purposefully... View Details

Keywords: Clusters; Agglomeration; Innovation; Industry Clusters; Innovation and Invention; Entrepreneurship; Patents

Find at Harvard

February 2002
Case

Fighting AIDS and Pricing Drugs

By: John T. Gourville

In early 2001, makers of AIDS drugs were suing to prevent developing countries from violating their patents. The issue was driven by price. The developing countries could not afford the market price for these drugs. At the same time, the drug companies were reluctant... View Details

Keywords: Developing Countries and Economies; Patents; Price; Strategy; Globalized Markets and Industries; Pharmaceutical Industry

13 Jan 2003
Research & Ideas

Making Biotech Work as a Business

influenced the industry by proving that intellectual property could be monetized through alliances with big pharmaceutical partners, according to Pisano. Genentech cut its first deal with Eli Lilly in 1982... View Details

Keywords: by Martha Lagace; Biotechnology; Health; Technology

06 Nov 2012
Op-Ed

Stop Talking About the Weather and Do Something: Three Ways to Finance Sustainable Cities

The wrath of Hurricane Sandy has illuminated a fundamental question: How do we ensure that our cities are resilient in the face of inevitable future disasters? A destroyed city is not a sustainable city. I'm making the case that it's time to stop complaining about... View Details

Keywords: by John Macomber; Construction; Real Estate; Energy; Utilities

November 2013
Teaching Plan

Hotel Ivory

By: Nicolas P. Retsinas and Lisa Strope

Cheick Sanankoua is an MBA student who believes that he has found the perfect investment property, a small, independently-owned hotel, on the Ivory Coast. However, he has had trouble raising money for the investment beyond friends and family. Through contacts in the... View Details

Keywords: Real Estate; Emerging Market; Private Equity; Property; Real Estate Industry; Africa

06 Feb 2006
Research & Ideas

Sorting Out the Patent Craze

The great thing about standards, tech industry pundit Andrew Tanenbaum once said, is that there are so many to choose from. In fact, standard setting organizations (SSOs) are the unsung heroes of the technology age. Without standards, Web... View Details

Keywords: by Sara Grant; Technology

2016
Working Paper

Patent Publication and the Market for Ideas

By: Deepak Hegde and Hong Luo

In this paper, we study the effect of invention disclosure through patent publication on the market for ideas. We do so by analyzing the effects of the American Inventor's Protection Act of 1999 (AIPA)—which required US patent applications to be published 18 months... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Biotechnology Industry

November 2012 (Revised November 2013)
Case

Generator Hostels: The Way Out

By: Nicolas P. Retsinas and Lisa Strope

Josh Wyatt, Director of Patron Capital Partners, needs to make an exit decision for a successful investment in Generator Hostels. After five years of explosive growth and in the middle of a financial crisis, Wyatt needs to evaluate Patron's alternatives: IPO the... View Details

Keywords: Hotel; Real Estate; Finance; Property; Accommodations Industry; European Union

January 2012
Case

Calvin Klein and Warnaco Group: Negotiating a Trademark License

By: Susan Fournier, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, William W. Fisher III and Robert Mnookin

Keywords: Trademarks; Negotiation; Apparel and Accessories Industry

October 2016 (Revised September 2017)
Case

The CRISPR-Cas9 Quarrel

By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Matthew G. Preble

In mid-2016, the Broad Institute and the University of California, Berkeley were in the middle of a contentious patent dispute over which entity controlled a breakthrough gene editing technology called CRISPR-Cas9. With CRISPR-Cas9, scientists might soon be able to... View Details

Keywords: CRISPR; Broad Institute; University Of California Berkeley; Intellectual Property; Patents; Law; Lawsuits and Litigation; Science; Genetics; Entrepreneurship; Biotechnology Industry; United States

2021
Working Paper

Winner Takes All? Tech Clusters, Population Centers, and the Spatial Transformation of U.S. Invention

By: Brad Chattergoon and William R. Kerr

U.S. invention has become increasingly concentrated around major tech centers since the 1970s, with implications for how much cities across the country share in concomitant local benefits. Is invention becoming a winner-takes-all race? We explore the rising spatial... View Details

Keywords: Invention; Innovation; Artificial Intelligence; Clusters; Agglomeration; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Applications and Software; Industry Clusters; United States