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- December 2011
- Article
Did R&D Firms Used to Patent? Evidence from the First Innovation Surveys
By: Tom Nicholas
Matching 2,777 R&D firms in surveys conducted by the National Research Council between 1921 and 1938 with U.S. patents reveals that 59 percent of all firms and 88 percent of publicly-traded firms patented. These shares are much higher than those observed for modern R&D... View Details
- 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
- June 2011 (Revised October 2013)
- Case
Gene Patents (A)
By: Richard Hamermesh, David Kiron and Phillip Andrews
In March 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Sweet overturned 30 years of legal precedent and ruled that unaltered human genes could not be patented. This case reviews patent law and how it relates to our increasing knowledge of the Human Genome. The case issues... View Details
- April 2011
- Teaching Note
Office of Technology Transfer - Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences (TN)
By: Willy Shih and Sen Chai
Teaching Note for 611057. View Details
- April 2011
- Article
Private Equity and Long-Run Investment: The Case of Innovation
By: Josh Lerner, Morten Sorensen and Per Stromberg
A long-standing controversy is whether LBOs relieve managers from short-term pressures of dispersed shareholders, or whether LBO funds themselves are driven by short-term profit motives and sacrifice long-term growth to boost short-term performance. We investigate 495... View Details
- April 2011
- Article
The Origins of Japanese Technological Modernization
By: Tom Nicholas
Explanations of Japanese technological modernization from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century have increasingly focused on domestic capabilities as opposed to the traditional emphasis on knowledge transfers from the West. Yet, the literature is mostly... View Details
Keywords: Knowledge Sharing; Body of Literature; Innovation and Invention; Technological Innovation; Patents; Measurement and Metrics; Expansion; Growth and Development Strategy; Economic Growth; Developing Countries and Economies; Information Technology; Technology Industry; Japan; Germany; Great Britain; United States
- March 2011 (Revised June 2012)
- Case
Office of Technology Transfer - Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences
By: Willy Shih, Sen Chai, Kamen Bliznashki and Courtney Hyland
Gordon Zong is trying to teach Chinese universities and research institutes how to do effective technology transfer and IP licensing, but he is trying to do it in an environment with weak property rights and an underdeveloped support infrastructure. As the managing... View Details
- March 2011
- Article
Cheaper Patents
By: Tom Nicholas
The 1883 Patents Act in Britain provides perspective for modern patent policy reforms because it radically changed incentives for inventors by reducing filing fees by 84 percent. Patents increased 2.5 fold after the reform, which was evenly distributed across the... View Details
Keywords: Patents; Global Range; Distribution; Demand and Consumers; Organizational Structure; Business Processes; Innovation and Invention; Innovation and Management; Policy; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Fluctuation; Motivation and Incentives; Distribution Industry; United States; Great Britain
- March 2011
- Article
To Join or Not to Join: Examining Patent Pool Participation and Rent Sharing Rules
By: Josh Lerner and Anne Layne-Farrar
In recognition that participation in modern patent pools is voluntary, we present empirical evidence on participation rates and the factors that drive the decision to join a pool, including the profit sharing rules adopted by the pool's founders. In most participation... View Details
- January 2011
- Supplement
Matrix Capital Management (B)
By: Malcolm P. Baker and David Lane
Ben Balbale, a partner at hedge fund Matrix Capital, must decide whether to exit their investment in Rovi Corporation, a company with a diverse portfolio of patents used primarily for digital interactive guides. Rovi's shares are up over 50% from the time Balbale... View Details
- January 2011
- Supplement
Matrix Capital Management (C)
By: Malcolm P. Baker and David Lane
Ben Balbale, a partner at hedge fund Matrix Capital, must decide whether to exit their investment in Rovi Corporation, a company with a diverse portfolio of patents used primarily for digital interactive guides. Rovi's shares are up over 50% from the time Balbale... View Details
- January 2011
- Teaching Note
The Travails of Rubber: Goodyear or Badyear? (TN)
By: Tom Nicholas
Teaching Note for 808118. View Details
- December 2010 (Revised March 2015)
- Case
The Wright Brothers and Their Flying Machines
By: Tom Nicholas and David Chen
Wilbur (1867-1912) and Orville (1871-1948) Wright were fascinated by the mystery of flight and they built on the ideas of prominent earlier figures such as Octave Chanute (1832-1910) the French-born American who was influential in fostering the free exchange of ideas... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Agglomerative Forces and Cluster Shapes
By: William R. Kerr and Scott Duke Kominers
We model spatial clusters of similar firms. Our model highlights how agglomerative forces lead to localized, individual connections among firms, while interaction costs generate a defined distance over which attraction forces operate. Overlapping firm interactions... View Details
- November 2010
- Article
The Litigation of Financial Innovations
By: Josh Lerner
This paper examines the litigation of patents relating to financial products and services. I show that these grants are being litigated at a rate 27 to 39 times greater than that of patents as a whole. The patents being litigated are disproportionately those issued to... View Details
- 2010
- Working Paper
Growth through Heterogeneous Innovations
By: Ufuk Akcigit and William R. Kerr
We study how exploration versus exploitation innovations impact economic growth through a tractable endogenous growth framework that contains multiple innovation sizes, multi-product firms, and entry/exit. Firms invest in exploration R&D to acquire new product lines... View Details
- September 2010 (Revised July 2013)
- Case
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals: Building Value from the IP Estate
By: Willy C. Shih and Sen Chai
The learning objective of this case is to help students recognize the interplay between intellectual property (IP) rights and corporate strategy. We do this by examining what is a fairly atypical circumstance today in which a single firm is able to secure what it... View Details
- September 2010
- Teaching Note
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals: Building Value from the IP Estate (TN)
By: Willy C. Shih
Teaching Note for 611009. View Details
- July 2010
- Article
The Supply Side of Innovation: H-1B Visa Reforms and U.S. Ethnic Invention
By: William R. Kerr and William F. Lincoln
This study evaluates the impact of high-skilled immigrants on U.S. technology formation. We use reduced-form specifications that exploit large changes in the H-1B visa program. Higher H-1B admissions increase immigrant science and engineering (SE) employment and... View Details
- May 2010 (Revised May 2013)
- Case
C.K. Claridge, Inc.
Sued for patent infringement, chemical manufacturer C.K. Claridge tries to design a settlement strategy taking into account a decision analysis of litigating v. negotiating. The plaintiffs are the patent holder and its sole licensee, who is also a CKC competitor. (This... View Details