The study of complex networks and the mechanisms underlying their formation gave an important direction to the research on the diffusion of information. It has been suggested that the network created by scientific citations follow a well-established picture of a scale-free network. Thus, citations should obey the basic mechanisms of preferential attachment, as in other examples of social networ...

A “submarine patent” is one whose issuance and publication has been intentionally delayed by its inventor with the hope that firms will independently discover and come to rely on a similar innovation at some later time, at which point the inventor causes his patent to issue and claims infringement. Although submarine patents are harmful to an innovation-led economy, previous research has strugg...

This paper looks more closely at the sources of patent growth in the United States since 1984. It confirms that the increase is largely due to US patenters, with an earlier surge in Asia, and some increase in Europe. I find that growth has taken place in all technologies, but not in all industries, being concentrated in the electrical technology-based industries (electrical, electronics, comput...

Australia, like most countries, faces high and rapidly-rising drug costs. There are longstanding concerns about pharmaceutical companies inappropriately extending their monopoly position by "evergreening" blockbuster drugs, through misuse of the patent system. There is, however, very little empirical information about this behaviour. We fill the gap by analysing all of the patents associated wi...

Investment in intellectual property is considered a shrewd business strategy. However, companies that invest heavily in patenting the results of research and development may later be surprised by their inability to generate revenue from their patent portfolios. This is because those seeking to enforce patents in the predictable arts may find themselves stymied by recent developments in patent j...

One of the major reasons why inventors are awarded patents by governments is they encourage R&D investments and commercialization of inventions. If the patent holder commercializes his invention, he has stronger incentives to retain the patent. The purpose here is to empirically analyze the relationship between commercialization and the renewal of patents. At the same time, I take into account ...

Introduction This paper presents an analysis of knowledge flows in the pharmaceutical innovation process. Backward citations, citations to non-patent literature (NPL), and forward citations that link patents, scientific publications, and pharmaceutical pipelines data on drug developments are analyzed and visualized to provide a more holistic understanding. Results show that patents linked to dr...

We examine the effect of patenting on the survival prospects of 356 internet-related firms that IPO'd at the height of the stock market bubble of the late 1990s. By March 2005, nearly 2/3 of these firms had delisted from the NASDAQ exchange. Although changes in the legal environment in the US in the 1990s made it much easier to obtain patents on software and, ultimately, on business methods, le...

This study investigates the trend of global concentration in scientific research and technological innovation around the world. It accepts papers and patents as appropriate data for revealing the development and status of science and technology respectively. The performance of these outputs in production and citation impact is taken into consideration in the analysis. The findings suggest that ...