Publications

November 1978 (Revised October 1989)
Case

Amicon Corp. (A)

Amicon holds a patent on a new process for the separation of blood plasma from whole blood. It has to decide whether to pursue a direct entry, joint venture, or licensing strategy. If it chooses licensing, there are many sub-issues to consider. View Details

Keywords: Technology; Patents; Commercialization; Health Care and Treatment; Biotechnology Industry

Educators

Web

Field Course: Life Sciences Venture Creation - Course Catalog

and how to do you build this out in a rational manner that investors will believe; building a business plan; developing budgets and milestones; intellectual property considerations and licensing/creation.... View Details

2024
Working Paper

Patent Hunters

By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun, Katie Moon and Paula Suh

Analyzing millions of patents granted by the USPTO between 1976 and 2020, we find a pattern where specific patents only rise to prominence after considerable time has passed. Amongst these late-blooming influential patents, we show that there are key players (patent... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Product Launch; Product; Innovation and Invention

June 2022
Article

The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Finance and Beyond

By: Josh Lerner and Amit Seru

Patents and citations are powerful tools for understanding innovation increasingly used in financial economics (and management research more broadly). Biases may result, however, from the interactions between the truncation of patents and citations and the changing... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Analytics and Data Science; Corporate Finance; Research

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

2018
Working Paper

Some Facts of High-Tech Patenting

By: Michael Webb, Nick Short, Nicholas Bloom and Josh Lerner

Patenting in software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has grown rapidly in recent years. Such patents are acquired primarily by large U.S. technology firms such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, and HP, as well as by Japanese multinationals such as Sony, Canon,... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Applications and Software; Technological Innovation; United States

SSRN

2018
Working Paper

Information Provision and Innovation: Natural Experiment of Herbal Patent Prior Art Adoption at the United States and European Patent Offices

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tarun Khanna

We exploit a natural experiment to study how codifying information about prior innovation affects subsequent innovation. A codified database of traditional Indian herbal formulations was adopted by the European Patent Office (EPO) and the U.S. Patent and Trademark... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Ethnicity; Health Care and Treatment; Pharmaceutical Industry; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; China; India

January 2011
Teaching Note

Ganeden Biotech, Inc. (TN)

By: Robert C. Pozen, Dale Alan Winger and Matthew Kenneth Ahlers

Teaching Note for 310073. View Details

Keywords: Business Ventures; Decisions; Investment; Intellectual Property; Strategy; Interests; Health Industry

Larissa S. Bifano concentrates on patent and other intellectual property strategy, counseling, prosecution, diligence, and litigation in the United States Patent and Trademark Office and federal courts. She... View Details

Profile

Andrew Boudreau

Andy heard a campus speaker talk about the 2+2 program for college students interested in the HBS MBA. Andy applied, got in, and spent the next two years expanding his work experience, first with a consulting firm that investigated the litigious aspects of View Details

07 Jun 2004
What Do You Think?

How Important are Big Ideas?

Summing Up Judging from responses to the June column, big ideas rank high on a list including technology and intellectual property as sources of competitive advantage. But they are only a starting point,... View Details

Keywords: by James Heskett

01 Sep 2007
News

Paulson Speaks on China at HBS

intellectual property protection, and domestic consumption. In addition, Paulson said, the Chinese will not “be able to develop the financial markets and banks they want unless they have a currency that... View Details

Keywords: Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Educational Services; Administration of Economic Programs; Government

2021
Other Unpublished Work

Computer-Implemented Methods and Systems for Measuring, Estimating, and Managing Economic Outcomes and Technical Debt in Software Systems and Projects: US Patent 11,126,427 B2

By: Daniel J. Sturtevant, Carliss Baldwin, Alan MacCormack, Sunny Ahn and Sean Gilliland

An interrelated set of tools and methods is disclosed for: (1) measuring the relationship between software source code attributes (such as code quality, design quality, test quality, and complexity metrics) and software economics outcome metrics (such as... View Details

Keywords: Technical Debt; Applications and Software; Economics; Measurement and Metrics; Patents

August 2001
Article

Technology as a Complex Adaptive System: Evidence from Patent Data

Keywords: Information Technology; System; Patents; Analytics and Data Science

10 Apr 2019
Working Paper Summaries

Trade Secrets Protection and Antitakeover Provisions

Keywords: by Aiyesha Dey and Joshua White

July 2022
Article

Estimating Spillovers from Publicly Funded R&D: Evidence from the US Department of Energy

By: Kyle Myers and Lauren Lanahan

We quantify the magnitude of R&D spillovers created by grants to small firms from the US Department of Energy. Our empirical strategy leverages variation due to state-specific matching policies, and we develop a new approach to measuring both geographic and... View Details

Keywords: Innovation; Energy; R＆D; Grants; Innovation and Invention; Research and Development; Patents; Performance; United States

2009
Working Paper

Patent Policy, Patent Pools, and the Accumulation of Claims in Sequential Innovation

By: Gaston Llanes and Stefano Trento

We present a dynamic model where the accumulation of patents generates an increasing number of claims on sequential innovation. We study the equilibrium innovation activity under three regimes: patents, no-patents and patent pools. Patent pools increase the probability... View Details

Keywords: Innovation and Invention; Patents; Rights; Mathematical Methods

May 2014
Supplement

RCA: Color Television and the Department of Justice (B)

By: Willy C. Shih and Gregory Dieterich

This case is a supplement to 614-072, which examines the early history of the color television receiver market, and the global consequences of an historic 1958 consent decree with the U.S. Department of Justice that opened RCA's patents to licensing by domestic... View Details

Keywords: Intellectual Property; Patents; Rights; Business Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Corporate Strategy; Business History; Information Technology; Information Infrastructure; Communications Industry; Media and Broadcasting Industry; Electronics Industry; United States; Japan

Article

Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from U.S. Patents

By: David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Gary P. Pisano and Pian Shu

Manufacturing accounts for more than three-quarters of U.S. corporate patents. The competitive shock to this sector emanating from China's economic ascent could in theory either augment or stifle U.S. innovation. Using three decades of U.S. patents matched to corporate... View Details

Keywords: Patents; Production; Trade; Competition; Innovation and Invention; United States