Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,023)
- Faculty Publications (287)
- January 2018 (Revised February 2023)
- Teaching Note
The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO
This teaching note pairs with the case entitled: “The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO” (case no. 617-027). View Details
- January 2018 (Revised May 2019)
- Case
Adeo Health Science: Turning a Product into a Brand
By: Elizabeth A. Keenan and Jill Avery
For decades, American parents were warned to avoid introducing potential allergens to their babies prior to their first birthday. But two influential clinical studies caused the medical establishment to radically reverse its position. Parents were now warned that... View Details
Keywords: Startup; Health Care; Consumer; Consumer Products; Branding; Distribution; Retailing; Go To Market Strategy; Marketing; Marketing Channels; Marketing Communications; Brands and Branding; Marketing Strategy; Entrepreneurship; Health Care and Treatment; Consumer Products Industry; Health Industry; United States; North America
- 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
- 2017
- Working Paper
The Use and Misuse of Patent Data: Issues for Corporate Finance and Beyond
By: Josh Lerner
Patents and citations are powerful tools for understanding innovative activity inside the firm and are increasingly used in corporate finance research. But due to the complexities of patent data collection and the changing spatial and industry composition of innovative... View Details
- 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
- 2017
- Article
High-Skilled Migration and Agglomeration
By: Sari Pekkala Kerr, William R. Kerr, Çağlar Özden and Christopher Parsons
This paper reviews recent research regarding high-skilled migration. We adopt a data-driven perspective, bringing together and describing several ongoing research streams that range from the construction of global migration databases, to the legal codification of... View Details
- July 2017
- Article
Intellectual Property Rights Protection, Ownership, and Innovation: Evidence from China
By: Lily Fang, Josh Lerner and Chaopeng Wu
Using a difference-in-difference approach, we study how intellectual property right (IPR) protection affects innovation in China in the years around the privatizations of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Innovation increases after SOE privatizations, and this increase... View Details
Keywords: Patents; Privatization; State Ownership; Trademarks; Copyright; Innovation and Invention; China
- 2017
- Working Paper
Knowledge Flows within Multinationals—Estimating Relative Influence of Headquarters and Host Context Using a Gravity Model
By: Prithwiraj Choudhury, Mike Horia Teodorescu and Tarun Khanna
From the perspective of a multinational subsidiary, we employ the classic gravity equation in economics to model and compare knowledge flows to the subsidiary from the MNC headquarters and from the host country context. We also generalize traditional economics gravity... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
U.S. High-Skilled Immigration, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship: Empirical Approaches and Evidence
By: William R. Kerr
High-skilled immigrants are a very important component of U.S. innovation and entrepreneurship. Immigrants account for roughly a quarter of U.S. workers in these fields, and they have a similar contribution in terms of output measures like patents or firm starts. This... View Details
- Article
Patent Trolling Isn't Dead—It's Just Moving to Delaware
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit G. Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers
- May 2017 (Revised October 2017)
- Case
Hyperloop Transportation Technologies: Building Breakthrough Innovations in Crowd-Powered Ecosystems
By: Lynda M. Applegate, Terri L. Griffith and Ann Majchrzak
Dirk Ahlborn, co-founder and CEO of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, Inc. (HTT) looks back at the evolving organizational design and community that allows HTT to be crowd-powered. Since the founding in 2013, HTT has dealt with building an organization with less... View Details
- May 2017
- Article
Immigration and the Rise of American Ingenuity
By: Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby and Tom Nicholas
We build on the analysis in Akcigit, Grigsby, and Nicholas (2017) by using U.S. patent and census data to examine the relationship between immigration and innovation. We construct a measure of foreign born expertise and show that technology areas where immigrant... View Details
- 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
- 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
- March 2017 (Revised February 2025)
- Case
Edwin Land: The Art and Science of Innovation
By: Tom Nicholas, Christopher T. Stanton and Matthew G. Preble
Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Polaroid first invented—and then continuously reinvented—the field of instant photography. Under the leadership of its mercurial founder Edwin Land, the company regularly released new instant cameras and films, often... View Details
Keywords: Instant Photography; Company History; Change Management; Disruption; Forecasting and Prediction; Entrepreneurship; Business History; Innovation Strategy; Disruptive Innovation; Innovation and Management; Intellectual Property; Patents; Product Marketing; Brands and Branding; Product Launch; Product Development; Chemical Industry; Consumer Products Industry; United States
- March–April 2017
- Article
Innovation Outcomes in a Distributed Organization: Intrafirm Mobility and Access to Resources
Prior research has established a relation between intra-firm mobility and innovation outcomes at distributed organizations. The literature has also uniformly agreed on the mechanism underlying this relationship: the sharing of tacit knowledge and recombination of ideas... View Details
- 2018
- Working Paper
Intellectual Baggage of Ethnic Migrant Inventors: Transfer and Recombination of Knowledge Across Borders
Ethnic migrant inventors might differ from locals in terms of knowledge they bring to host firms. We study the role of first-generation ethnic migrant inventors in cross-border transfer of knowledge previously locked within the cultural context of their home regions.... View Details
- 2017
- Working Paper
The Rise of American Ingenuity: Innovation and Inventors of the Golden Age
By: Ufuk Akcigit, John Grigsby and Tom Nicholas
We examine the golden age of U.S. innovation by undertaking a major data collection exercise linking inventors from historical U.S. patents to Federal Censuses between 1880 and 1940 and to regional economic aggregates. We provide a theoretical framework to motivate the... View Details
- 2017
- Chapter
Empirical Evidence on the Behavior and Impact of Patent Trolls: A Survey
By: Lauren Cohen, Umit Gurun and Scott Duke Kominers
We survey the empirical literature on non-practicing entity (NPE) litigation behavior and its consequences. We document both aggregate trends and cross-sectional differences amongst various types of NPEs. Survey evidence illustrates a number of ways in which NPEs can... View Details
Keywords: Patent Trolls; NPEs; PAEs; Innovation; Patents; Lawsuits and Litigation; Innovation and Invention
- 2016
- Working Paper
Foreign Competition and Domestic Innovation: Evidence from U.S. Patents
By: David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Pian Shu and Gary Pisano
Manufacturing is the locus of U.S. innovation, accounting for more than three quarters of U.S. corporate patents. The rise of import competition from China has represented a major competitive shock to the sector, which in theory could benefit or stifle innovation. In... View Details