Publications
Publications
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- All HBS Web
(1,417)
- Faculty Publications (437)
- Article
Lessons From Hollywood: A New Approach To Funding R&D
By: Gary P. Pisano and Andrew W. Lo
Companies find it increasingly difficult to justify long-term, risky R&D investments—particularly in science-based fields such as biotechnology, advanced materials, and energy. We argue in this article that the traditional venture model has limits for such investments... View Details
- December 2016
- Case
Muñoz Group Faces Brexit
By: Forest Reinhardt and Annelena Lobb
In 2016, Muñoz Group, a multifaceted agribusiness company that developed, produced, packed, imported, and exported citrus, flowers, grapes, juice, and ice cream, faced an unexpected new challenge in the British public’s vote for the United Kingdom to exit the European... View Details
- 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
- December 2016
- Article
The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales, Revisited
By: Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf
Even as we approach the twentieth anniversary of widespread file sharing, its impact on the sale of copyrighted material remains in dispute. We contributed to this debate with an early study, “The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis,” that was... View Details
- November 2016
- Supplement
Alnylam Pharmaceuticals: Building Value from the IP Estate (B)
By: Vicki Sato, Willy Shih and Matt Higgins
The leader of a pioneering biotech company in the siRNA space weighs his options for scaling production capacity in advance of an anticipated commercial launch. Operational complexity and relative merits of in-house manufacturing versus a contractor model are... View Details
- November–December 2016
- Article
The Impact of Patent Wars on Firm Strategy: Evidence from the Global Smartphone Industry
By: Yongwook Paik and 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
- 2016
- Working Paper
Innovation Network
By: Daron Acemoglu, Ufuk Akcigit and William 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
- 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
- 2016
- Working Paper
Patent Disclosures and Standard-Setting
By: Josh Lerner, Haris Tabakovic and Jean Tirole
A key role of standard setting organizations (SSOs) is to aggregate information on relevant intellectual property (IP) claims before deciding on a standard. This article explores the firms’ strategies in response to IP disclosure requirements—in particular, the choice... View Details
- 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
- 2016
- Working Paper
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
- June 2016
- Case
The Redevelopment of Palazzo Tornabuoni (B)
By: Sid Yog, Arthur I Segel and Ricardo Andrade
On December 16, 2010, Byrne Murphy received a call from his Italian partner at Fingen Group. The recently renovated Palazzo Tornabuoni, an iconic 15th century palace in the heart of Florence, Italy, had been seized by the local police. While Murphy tries to understand... 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
- November 2015
- Article
Modularity and Intellectual Property Protection
By: Carliss Y. Baldwin and Joachim Henkel
Modularity is a means of partitioning technical knowledge about a product or process. When state-sanctioned intellectual property (IP) rights are ineffective or costly to enforce, modularity can be used to hide information and thus protect IP. We investigate the impact... View Details
- 2015
- Book
Land Bargains and Chinese Capitalism: The Politics of Property Rights under Reform
By: Meg Rithmire
Land reforms have been critical to the development of Chinese capitalism over the last several decades, yet land in China remains publicly owned. This book explores the political logic of reforms to land ownership and control, accounting for how land development and... 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