Publications

01 Sep 2016
News

Behind Apple’s Success, An Unprecedented Financial Model

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

February 2008 (Revised May 2011)
Case

The Travails of Rubber: Goodyear or Badyear?

By: Tom Nicholas and Andrew Ferguson

Explores the reason why Charles Goodyear, inventor of rubber vulcanization, was unable to profit from his discovery despite securing international property rights over his invention through a patent in 1844. Considers the utility of patents as an incentive for... View Details

Keywords: Crime and Corruption; Entrepreneurship; Cross-Cultural and Cross-Border Issues; Innovation and Invention; Patents; Motivation and Incentives; Commercialization

October 2013 (Revised January 2015)
Case

The Slingshot: Improving Water Access

By: John A. Quelch, Margaret L. Rodriguez and Carin-Isabel Knoop

In 2012, over 750 million people around the globe lacked access to safe drinking water. Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, sought to bring fresh water to poor and rural areas with the Slingshot, a water purification device. Kamen's challenge was to identify ways to... View Details

Greater job mobility among engineers and scientists has caused the extended social networks of inventors to become increasingly connected. Firms that operate within small worlds such as in Silicon Valley long ago learned to manage invention in an... View Details

March 2020
Article

Organizing Knowledge Production Teams Within Firms for Innovation

By: Vikas A. Aggarwal, David H. Hsu and Andy Wu

How should firms organize their pool of inventive human capital for firm-level innovation? While access to diverse knowledge may aid knowledge recombination, which can facilitate innovation, prior literature has focused primarily on one way of achieving that: diversity... View Details

Keywords: Knowledge Recombination; Organization Design; Team Boundary; Innovation; Knowledge Sharing; Diversity; Innovation and Invention; Groups and Teams; Human Capital; Organizational Design

26 Apr 2011
Working Paper Summaries

The Contingent Effect of Absorptive Capacity: An Open Innovation Analysis

Keywords: by Andrew A. King & Karim R. Lakhani

24 Aug 2017
Video

Building Businesses around Breakthrough Science

13 Jun 2017
First Look

First Look at New Research and Ideas, June 13

between immigration and innovation. We construct a measure of foreign born expertise and show that technology areas where immigrant inventors were prevalent between 1880 and 1940 experienced more patenting and citations between 1940 and... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

July 2010 (Revised September 2023)
Case

Werner von Siemens and the Electric Telegraph

By: Geoffrey Jones and Bjoern von Siemens

This case describes the nineteenth century founding by Werner Siemens of the Siemens electrical business in Germany. Werner's dual role as inventor and entrepreneur is explored as he created one of the world's first multinational enterprises, whose growth initially... View Details

Keywords: Business Organization; Family Business; Entrepreneurship; Multinational Firms and Management; Business History; Growth and Development Strategy; Electronics Industry; Telecommunications Industry; Germany

16 Sep 2015
News

Faculty Q&A: The Working World

01 Aug 2011
Research & Ideas

Immigrant Innovators: Job Stealers or Job Creators?

information about inventors' immigration status or ethnicities, they do contain the inventors' names. By utilizing name-matching software, the researchers could infer the ethnicity of inventors at any given firm. An View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Technology

September 2009 (Revised February 2011)
Case

Intellectual Ventures

By: Andrei Hagiu, David B. Yoffie and Alison Berkley Wagonfeld

Intellectual Ventures creates and acquires intellectual property, which it then seeks to monetize through non-exclusive licensing. In early 2009, as an increasing number of companies were trying to position themselves as leading intermediaries in the market for... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Innovation and Invention; Intellectual Property; Rights; Service Operations; Research and Development; Technology; Service Industry

04 Oct 2012
News

Baker Library’s Historical Collections Receive Papers of Computer Pioneer and Philanthropist An Wang

April 2017
Article

Prizes, Patents and the Search for Longitude

By: M. Diane Burton and Tom Nicholas

The 1714 Longitude Act created the Board of Longitude to administer a large monetary prize and progress payments for the precise determination of a ship’s longitude. However, the prize did not prohibit patenting. We use a new dataset of marine chronometer inventors to... View Details

Keywords: Prizes; Innovation; Patents; Innovation and Invention; Motivation and Incentives

August 2011
Article

Independent Invention During the Rise of the Corporate Economy in Britain and Japan

By: Tom Nicholas

Independent inventors accounted for approximately half of all patents in Britain and Japan by 1930, despite the rise of the corporate economy and the spread of industrial R&D. A mixture of patent renewal and historical citations data reveals that the quality of... View Details

Keywords: Independent Innovation and Invention; Development Economics; Research and Development; Patents; System; Motivation and Incentives; Tokyo; London; United States

March 2010
Article

The Role of Independent Invention in U.S. Technological Development, 1880-1930

By: Tom Nicholas

Why did independent inventors account for over half of US patents by 1930 and more than three times the number granted to R&D firms? Using new data on patents and historical patent citations, I show that independents supplied high quality innovations to a... View Details

Keywords: History; Technological Innovation; Patents; Urban Scope; Independent Innovation and Invention; Research and Development; United States