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- 2025
- Working Paper
Transferability MATTRs: Towards Understanding Antecedents of Strategic Licensing
By: Dafna F. Bearson and Maria P. Roche
This paper examines the antecedents of firms’ decisions to license intellectual property
(IP). We propose a conceptual framework emphasizing two critical factors: (1) transferability,
which we define as the ease of moving knowledge embodied in inventions across
firm... View Details
- August 2024
- Case
Oculii
By: Andy Wu and Lucas Defilippo
It was a bright June day in 2016. Steven Hong, co-founder and COO of Oculii had just signed a letter of intent agreeing to a 51% stake acquisition by Nexteer Automotive, a global steering and driveline supplier company that developed advanced driver assistance systems... View Details
- July 2024
- Technical Note
Intellectual Property in Tough Tech Ventures
By: Joshua Lev Krieger, Jim Matheson, Russ Wilcox and Mel Martin
This note explains the crucial role of intellectual property rights (IPR), particularly patents, in the success of tough tech ventures (TTVs). It outlines the patent system's mechanics, emphasizing utility patents and their requirements for novelty, non-obviousness,... View Details
Keywords: Intellectual Property
- 2023
- Other Article
The Harvard USPTO Patent Dataset: A Large-Scale, Well-Structured, and Multi-Purpose Corpus of Patent Applications
By: Mirac Suzgun, Luke Melas-Kyriazi, Suproteem K. Sarkar, Scott Duke Kominers and Stuart Shieber
Innovation is a major driver of economic and social development, and information about many kinds of innovation is embedded in semi-structured data from patents and patent applications. Though the impact and novelty of innovations expressed in patent data are difficult... View Details
- July 2023 (Revised July 2024)
- Case
Miracle Therapeutics: Negotiating an IP License (A)
By: Satish Tadikonda, Michael Singer, William Marks and Wendi Yajnik
(General Experience Case) Beth Sharp and Jennifer Brilliant founded Miracle Therapeutics based on intellectual property developed by Brilliant and her post-doctoral student, John Supreme, in Brilliant’s lab at Elite University (EU). Miracle will have to obtain a... View Details
- October 2022
- Case
Afrigen Biologics: Vaccines for the Global South
By: Debora L. Spar and Julia Comeau
The majority of vaccines used on the continent of Africa (99%) are produced offshore. This makes African nations reliant on the West for major health care needs, a problem which was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Afrigen Biologics (in partnership with the WHO)... View Details
- August 3, 2022
- Article
Why NFT Creators Are Going cc0
Strategies for building brands, communities, and content through intellectual property (IP) vary greatly across NFT projects. Some maintain more or less standard IP protections; others give just NFT owners rights to innovate upon the associated intellectual property;... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised September 2022)
- Case
InstaDeep: AI Innovation Born in Africa (A)
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Esel Çekin
Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim were the co-founders of InstaDeep, a deep tech startup focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Instadeep was one of the few companies globally that were partnering with DeepMind, an AI subsidiary of Google [Alphabet Inc.].... View Details
- February 2022 (Revised July 2022)
- Supplement
InstaDeep: AI Innovation Born in Africa (B)
By: Shikhar Ghosh and Esel Çekin
Karim Beguir and Zohra Slim were the co-founders of InstaDeep, a deep tech startup focusing on artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. Instadeep was one of the few companies globally that were partnering with DeepMind, an AI subsidiary of Google [Alphabet Inc.].... View Details
- 2024
- Working Paper
Omnia Juncta in Uno: Foreign Powers and Trademark Protection in Shanghai's Concession Era
By: Laura Alfaro, Cathy Bao, Maggie X. Chen, Junjie Hong and Claudia Steinwender
We investigate how firms and markets adapt to trademark protection, an extensively utilized but under-examined form of IP protection to address asymmetric information, by exploring a historical precedent: China’s 1923 trademark law. Exploiting unique, newly digitized... View Details
- February 2021
- Module Note
Intellectual Property Strategy
By: Andy Wu and Aticus Peterson
Managing intellectual property (IP) in information technology—digital technologies like software or computing hardware—requires a distinct strategic approach. This note summarizes the high-level strategic considerations for managers of information technology businesses... View Details
- February 2020
- Case
Intellectual Ventures Update 2020
By: David B. Yoffie and Daniel Fisher
After raising $6 billion and buying 60,000 patents, Intellectual Venture (IV) was confronted with a changing legal environment. After a number of important legal decisions, including the Supreme Court's so-called "Alice" decision, IV had to shift strategy. IV sold off... View Details
- June 2018 (Revised August 2019)
- Case
Qualcomm Inc., 2019
By: David B. Yoffie and Andrew S. Choi
This case is set in mid-2019, when Qualcomm was struggling with unwanted take-over battles, fights with Apple and the Chinese government, and internal dissension on the board of directors. Ten years earlier Qualcomm was hailed as a monopoly on CDMA technologies and... View Details
- February 2018
- Background Note
Patent Trolling
By: Lauren H. Cohen, Umit G. Gurun, Scott Duke Kominers and George Hou
The U.S. Intellectual Property (IP) Ecosystem is one of the most robust and dynamic in the world—and has been for centuries. The bedrock of this system is the "patent," a legal document that allows its holder exclusive commercialization rights of a part of the "idea... View Details
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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