Publications

2011
Working Paper

Managing Political Risk in Global Business: Beiersdorf 1914-1990

By: Geoffrey Jones and Christina Lubinski

This working paper examines corporate strategies of political risk management during the twentieth century. It focuses especially on Beiersdorf, a German-based pharmaceutical and skin care company. During World War I the expropriation of its brands and trademarks... View Details

Keywords: History; Risk Management; Business History; Multinational Firms and Management; Corporate Strategy; Intellectual Property; Cooperation; Business and Government Relations; Germany

April 2017
Case

The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Tarun Khanna and Sarah Mehta

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal government agency responsible for evaluating and granting patents and trademarks. In 2015, the USPTO employed approximately 8,000 patent examiners who granted nearly 300,000 patents to inventors. As of April... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Telework; Collaborating With Unions; Human Resources; Recruitment; Retention; Intellectual Property; Copyright; Patents; Trademarks; Knowledge Sharing; Technology Adoption; Organizational Change and Adaptation; Performance Productivity; Performance Improvement; District of Columbia

Educators

2015
Chapter

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Renewable Energy

By: Ramana Nanda, Ken Younge and Lee Fleming

We document three facts related to innovation and entrepreneurship in renewable energy. Using data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, we first show that patenting in renewable energy remains highly concentrated in a few large energy firms. In 2009, the top 20... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurial Finance; Entrepreneurial Management; Energy; Finance; Entrepreneurship; Energy Industry

April 2021
Article

Work-From-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographical Flexibility

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi and Barbara Larson

An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work-from-anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work-from-home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility, work-from-anywhere (WFA) programs... View Details

Keywords: Geographic Flexibility; Work-from-anywhere; Remote Work; Telecommuting; Geographic Mobility; USPTO; Employees; Geographic Location; Performance Productivity

Find at Harvard

Why you should watch: A new and important NBER working paper, by Cohen, Gurun and Nguyen, takes a long hard look at innovation in the energy industry - and concludes that divestment campaigns targeted at fossil fuel companies may not just be ineffective.... View Details

Work‐from‐anywhere: The productivity effects of geographic flexibility

An emerging form of remote work allows employees to work‐from‐anywhere, so that the worker can choose to live in a preferred geographic location. While traditional work‐from‐home (WFH) programs offer the worker temporal flexibility,... View Details

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

Educators

2008
Working Paper

Applicant and Examiner Citations in U.S. Patents: An Overview and Analysis

By: Juan Alcacer, Michelle Gittelman and Bhaven Sampat

Researchers studying innovation increasingly use indicators based on patent citations. However, it is well known that not all citations originate from applicants—patent examiners contribute to citations listed in issued patents—and that this could complicate... View Details

Keywords: Citations; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Research; United States

March 2009
Article

Applicant and Examiner Citations in U.S. Patents: An Overview and Analysis

By: Juan Alcacer, Michelle Gittelman and Bhaven Sampat

Prior art patent citations have become a popular measure of patent quality and knowledge flow between firms. Interpreting these measurements is complicated, in some cases, because prior art citations are added by patent examiners as well as by patent applicants. The... View Details

Keywords: Citations; Patents; Knowledge Sharing; Measurement and Metrics; Quality; United States

Find at Harvard

Article

Capturing Value from Intellectual Property (IP) in a Global Environment

By: Juan Alcácer, Karin Beukel and Bruno Cassiman

Globalization should provide firms with an opportunity to leverage their know-how and reputation across countries to create value. However, it remains challenging for them to actually capture that value using traditional Intellectual Property (IP) tools. In this paper,... View Details

Keywords: Appropriation Strategy; Counterfeit; Intellectual Property Rights; Litigation; Value Capturing; Intellectual Property; Rights; Value; Lawsuits and Litigation; Global Range; Situation or Environment

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Article

"Troll" Check? A Proposal for Administrative Review of Patent Litigation

By: Lauren Cohen, John Golden, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers

The patent system is commonly justified as a way to promote social welfare and, more specifically, technological progress. For years, however, there has been concern that patent litigation is undermining, rather than furthering, these goals. Particularly in the United... View Details

Keywords: Patent Trolls; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation

2017
Working Paper

The Need for Speed: Effects of Uncertainty Reduction in Patenting

By: Mike Horia Teodorescu

Patents are essential in commerce to establish property rights for ideas and to give equal protection to firms that develop new technologies. Young firms especially depend on the protection of intellectual property to bring a product from concept to market. However,... View Details

Keywords: Startups; Natural Language Processing; Machine Learning; Patents; Business Startups; Risk and Uncertainty; Outcome or Result; Green Technology Industry

Research Summary

The new property: computational property, intellectual property, and cyberspace

The objective of this project is to design ownership regimes for property located in cyberspace, such as websites, links for e-travel, applets that run on distant processors, and other related computational species. The driving assumption of the project is that the... View Details

06 Jun 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas: June 6, 2017

Examination at the USPTO The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the federal government agency responsible for evaluating and granting patents and trademarks. In 2015, the USPTO employed approximately 8,000 patent examiners who... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

2023
Other Article

The Harvard USPTO Patent Dataset: A Large-Scale, Well-Structured, and Multi-Purpose Corpus of Patent Applications

By: Mirac Suzgun, Luke Melas-Kyriazi, Suproteem K. Sarkar, Scott Duke Kominers and Stuart Shieber

Innovation is a major driver of economic and social development, and information about many kinds of innovation is embedded in semi-structured data from patents and patent applications. Though the impact and novelty of innovations expressed in patent data are difficult... View Details

Keywords: USPTO; Natural Language Processing; Classification; Summarization; Patent Novelty; Patent Trolls; Patent Enforceability; Patents; Innovation and Invention; Intellectual Property; AI and Machine Learning; Analytics and Data Science