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- October 11, 2016
- Article
Innovation Network
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr
Technological progress builds upon itself, with the expansion of invention in one domain propelling future work in linked fields. Our analysis uses 1.8 million U.S. patents and their citation properties to map the innovation network and its strength. Past innovation... View Details
- Article
Invention and Agglomeration in the Bay Area: Not Just ICT
By: Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb and Shane Greenstein
We document that the Bay Area rose from 4% of all successful US patent applications in 1976 to 16% in 2008. This is partly driven by the increase in the prevalence of information and communication technology; however, even for patents unrelated to information and... View Details
- Article
The Growing Problem of Patent Trolling
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers
The last decade has seen a sharp rise in patent litigation in the U.S., with 2015 having one of the highest patent lawsuit counts on record. In theory, this could be a consequence of growth in the commercialization of technology and innovation—patent lawsuits increase... View Details
- 2016
- Working Paper
The Impact of Patent Wars on Firm Strategy: Evidence from the Global Smartphone Market
By: Feng Zhu
Strategy scholars have documented in various empirical settings that firms seek and leverage stronger institutions to mitigate hazards and gain competitive advantage. In this paper, we argue that such “institution-seeking” behavior may not be confined to the pursuit of... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Financial Patent Quality: Finance Patents After State Street
By: Josh Lerner, Andrew Speen, Mark Baker and Ann Leamon
In the past two decades, patents of inventions related to financial services ("finance patents"), as well as litigation around these patents, have surged. One of the repeated concerns voiced by academics and practitioners alike has been about the quality of these... View Details
- 2015
- Chapter
Information Technology and the Distribution of Inventive Activity
By: Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb and Shane Greenstein
We examine the relationship between the diffusion of advanced Internet technology and the geographic concentration of invention, as measured by patents. First, we show that patenting became more concentrated from the early 1990s to the early 2000s and, similarly, that... View Details
- June 2015 (Revised January 2017)
- Case
Epistar and the Global LED Market
By: Willy C. Shih, Chen-Fu Chien and Hung-Kai Wang
It took BJ Lee many years to learn how to navigate the patent minefield that was the global LED industry. When his company was first spun off from the Industrial Technology Research Institute in Taiwan, he thought the essence of a good IP strategy was to develop a... View Details
- June 2015
- Article
Standard-Essential Patents
By: Josh Lerner and Jean Tirole
A major policy issue in standard setting is that patents that are ex-ante not that important may, by being included into the standard, become standard-essential patents (SEPs). In an attempt to curb the monopoly power that they create, most standard-setting... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Are Patents Creative or Destructive?
By: Tom Nicholas
Current debate over patent aggregation has led to renewed interest in the long-standing question concerning whether patents are a creative or a destructive influence on the process of technological development. In this paper I examine the basic patent tradeoff between... View Details
- Article
Did Bank Distress Stifle Innovation During the Great Depression?
By: Ramana Nanda and Tom Nicholas
We find a negative relationship between bank distress and the level, quality, and trajectory of firm-level innovation during the Great Depression, particularly for R&D firms operating in capital intensive industries. However, we also show that because a sufficient... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Patent Trolls: Evidence from Targeted Firms
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers
We provide the first large-sample evidence on the behavior and impact of non-practicing entities (NPEs) in the intellectual property space. We find that on average, NPEs appear to behave as opportunistic “patent trolls.” NPEs sue cash-rich firms—and target cash in... View Details
- 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
- May 2014 (Revised July 2016)
- Case
RCA: Color Television and the Department of Justice (A)
By: Willy C. Shih and Gregory Dieterich
This case 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 competitors royalty-free. This externality... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
Bio-Piracy or Prospering Together? Fuzzy Set and Qualitative Analysis of Herbal Patenting by Firms
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury and Tarun Khanna
Since the 1990s, several Western firms have filed patents based on medicinal herbs from emerging markets, evoking protests from local stakeholders against 'bio-piracy'. We explore conditions under which firms and local stakeholders share rents from such patents. Our... View Details
Keywords: Rents From New Technology; Local Stakeholders; Herbal Patents; QCA; Fuzzy Set Analysis; Qualitative Case Studies; Plant-Based Agribusiness; Patents; Emerging Markets; Health Care and Treatment; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Agriculture and Agribusiness Industry; Pharmaceutical Industry
- 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
- January 2014
- Supplement
Fred Khosravi and AccessClosure (C)
By: Richard Hamermesh and Lauren Barley
On September 11, 2013, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied St. Jude's request to rehear an appeal on the "double patenting" ruling for the '439 patent. Further, it removed the injunction threat that was hanging over the... View Details
- January 2014
- Article
The Consequences of Entrepreneurial Finance: Evidence from Angel Financings
By: William R. Kerr, Josh Lerner and Antoinette Schoar
This paper documents that ventures that are funded by two successful angel groups experience superior outcomes to rejected ventures: they have improved survival, exits, employment, patenting, web traffic, and financing. We use strong discontinuities in angel funding... View Details
- 2013
- Working Paper
Heterogeneous Technology Diffusion and Ricardian Trade Patterns
By: William R. Kerr
This study tests the importance of Ricardian technology differences for international trade. The empirical analysis has three comparative advantages: including emerging and advanced economies, isolating panel variation regarding the link between productivity and... View Details
- October 2013 (Revised January 2014)
- Supplement
Fred Khosravi and AccessClosure (B)
By: Richard G. Hamermesh and Lauren Barley
It was January 2013, and Fred Khosravi, chairman of the board of AccessClosure Inc., wondered what the new year had in store for him and AccessClosure, the company he founded in late 2002. Khosravi was cautiously optimistic—the Mountain View, California-based medical... View Details
- September 2013
- Article
Prizes, Publicity, and Patents: Non-Monetary Awards as a Mechanism to Encourage Innovation
By: Petra Moser and Tom Nicholas
This paper exploits the selection of prize-winning technologies among exhibitors at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1851 to examine whether—and how—ex post prizes that are awarded to high-quality innovations may encourage future innovation. U.S. patent data... View Details