The impact of patent protection on biomedical innovation has been a controversial issue. Although a ‘medical anti-commons’ has been predicted as a result of a proliferation of patents on upstream technologies, evidence to test these concerns is only now emerging. However, most industrial surveys that shed light on this issue are mainly from developed countries, making it very difficult to predi...

In their article, How Courts Adjudicate Patent Definiteness and Disclosure, John R. Allison and Lisa Larrimore Ouellette present a comprehensive study—thirty years’ worth of cases—of federal courts’ application of patent law’s written-description, definiteness, and enablement requirements. Using their own hand-coded dataset, Allison and Ouellette measure a number of interesting disparities in c...

Indian pharmaceutical industry so far has reformed globally as a powerhouse for production of drugs after implementation of Indian patent act (IPA) in 1970. After implementation of Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) act on March 23, 2005, India’s weak process patent system has been replaced by a strict product patent system resulting in a big question mark on the affo...

The great potential of lipases is known since 1930 when the work of J. B. S. Haldane was published. After eighty-five years of studies and developments, are lipases still important biocatalysts? For answering this question the present work investigated the technological development of four important industrial sectors where lipases are applied: production of detergent formulations; organic synt...

Using patent data, we propose a new quantitative analysis to investigate the integration type and degree of leading edge technologies in order to examine the research & development (R&D) status, efficiency and strategies of companies. Defining three types of categorization based on IPC (International Patent Classification) and CO-IPC of patents, the concept of “innovation position” is introduce...

Many firms actively disclose research findings in scientific peer-reviewed journals. The literature highlights several potential benefits of such scientific boundary-spanning activities, including privileged access to academic information networks. However, scientific disclosure may lead to unintended knowledge spillovers. It remains unclear whether active engagement in science leads to higher ...

We examine career patterns within the industrial, academic, and governmental sectors and their relation to the publication and patent productivity of scientists and engineers working at university-based research centers in the United States. We hypothesize that among university scientists, intersectoral changes in jobs throughout the career provide access to new social networks and scientific a...

The impact of patent protection on biomedical innovation has been a controversial issue. Although a “medical anti-commons” has been predicted due to a proliferation of patents on upstream technologies, evidence to test these concerns is only now emerging. However, most industrial surveys that shed light on this issue are mainly from developed countries, making it very difficult to predict the i...