This article uses citations to patents disclosed in the standard setting process to measure the technological significance of voluntary standard setting organizations (SSOs). We find that SSO patents are outliers in several dimensions and importantly, are cited far more frequently than a set of control patents. More surprisingly, we find that SSO patents receive citations for a much longer peri...

One of the most challenging problems in technological forecasting is to identify as early as possible those technologies that have the potential to lead to radical changes in our society. In this paper, we use the US patent citation network (1926-2010) to test our ability to early identify a list of historically significant patents through citation network analysis. We show that in order to eff...

In this paper we distinguish between two motivations that academic scientists may adopt when dealing with patenting activities: a proactive one, where scientists are patent enthusiastic, do believe in the entrepreneurial university and are actively looking for patents. Second, a reactive one, where scientists are more reluctant to patent and, if they however patent, it is only because they are ...

BACKGROUND To analyze multi-source data including publications and patents, and try to draw the whole landscape of the research and development community in the field of gene therapy for breast cancer. MATERIALS AND METHODS Publications and patents were collected from the Web of science and databases of the five major patent offices of the world, respectively. Bibliometric methodologies and t...

We take a first look at financial patents at the European Patent Office (EPO). As is the case at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), the number of financial patents in Europe has increased significantly in parallel with significant changes in payment and financial systems. Scholars have argued that financial patents, like other business methods patents, have low value and are owned for ...

This paper examines Chinese pesticide firms’ use and perceptions of various means of intellectual property (IP) protection in protecting their innovations, using a unique dataset from 97 pesticide firms surveyed in 2008. These firms rate Chinese patents as quite effective in protecting their IP from infringement, although 70 percent of them state that improved enforcement is needed. Those firms...

Patent pools are cooperative agreements between two or more firms to license their related patents as a bundle. In a continuous-time model of multi-stage innovations we characterize firms’ incentives to perform R&D when they anticipate the possibility of starting a pool of complementary patents, which can be essential or nonessential. A coalition formation protocol leads the first innovators to...