Business Commons^™

Anti-Patents, Roy Baharad, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Ehud Gutte

Faculty Scholarship

Conventional wisdom has long perceived the patent and tort systems as separate legal entities, each tasked with a starkly different mission. Patent law rewards novel ideas; tort law deters harmful conduct. Against this backdrop, this Essay uncovers the opposing effects of patent and tort law on innovation, introducing the "injurer-innovator problem." Patent law incentivizes injurers --often uniquely positioned to make technological breakthroughs--by allowing them to profit from licensing their inventions to competitors. Yet tort law, by imposing liability for failures to invest in care, forces injurers to incur the cost of implementing their own innovations. When the cost of self-implementation …

The Relationship Between Labor Market Institutions And Innovation In 177 European Regions Over The Period 2000-2015, Gaetano Perone

CBER Conference

The main goal of this paper was to investigate the relationship between a set of labor market institutions (LMIs) and innovation (proxied by patent density) in 174 NUT-1 and NUT-2 European regions, over the period 2000-2015. Fixed effects with Driscoll and Kraay's (1998) standard errors (FE-DK), ordinary least squares (OLS), the generalized method of moments estimation of the fixed effects (FE-GMM), and a multilevel model (MLM) were employed.

A Case Study Of The Complicated History Of Rice University’S First Patents, Hannah G. Edlund

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association

Digitization and online public databases have made patent searches a much simpler pursuit in recent years. However, uncovering a pre-digital era patent’s history and context remains challenging. A search for the first patents assigned to Rice University highlighted associated issues. Older patent formats often do not clearly indicate inventor-assignee relationships, and applications and official communications are not available online. To determine how Rice came to own three 1948 patents, extensive archival research was required. Were these patents assigned to the University by inventors, independent of its support or funding, or was their work performed at and for Rice, thus obliging …

“That Means Nothing To Me As A Normal Person Who Doesn't Know About Patents”: Usability Testing Of Google Patents And Patent Public Search With Undergraduate Engineering Students, Graham Sherriff, Molly Rogers

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association

Patent searching is an important research tool for undergraduate engineering students, yet it requires special topic knowledge to conduct successfully. Patent database websites have the ability to alleviate or add to the complexity of patent searching, depending on their usability. Prompted by the launch of the US Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Public Search (PPS) website in early 2022, the authors investigated the usability of PPS and Google Patents. The study's objective was to gain insights into the ways in which the websites of commonly-used patent databases support undergraduate students’ patent searching activities. The study examined students’ performance of typical …

Antitrust Interoperability Remedies, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Compelled interoperability can be a useful remedy for dominant firms, including large digital platforms, who violate the antitrust laws. They can address competition concerns without interfering unnecessarily with the structures that make digital platforms attractive and that have contributed so much to economic growth.

Given the wide variety of structures and business models for big tech, “interoperability” must be defined broadly. It can realistically include everything from “dynamic” interoperability that requires real time sharing of data and operations, to “static” interoperability which requires portability but not necessarily real time interactions. Also included are the compelled sharing of intellectual property or …

Patents And Market Research: Librarians Partnering To Assist Bioengineering Senior Design Teams, Jennifer L. Groff, Meredith Futral

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association

Clemson’s business and engineering librarians have partnered to create a two-step, efficient process to assist Bioengineering Senior Design students in understanding patents and patent searching and market research. Clemson University’s required two-semester Bioengineering Senior Design program matches teams of students with regional clinicians to develop biomedical devices that they research, design, prototype, and test. In the first semester of the program, in which the business and engineering librarians are involved, students take BioE4010-Bioengineering Design Theory. BioE4010 is offered in both the Fall and Spring semesters, but enrollment is significantly higher in the fall. For example, in the Fall of 2021 …

Questioning Authority: Patents And Source Evaluation In An Era Of Misinformation, Jess O'Toole

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association

In the world of academic research, patents are classified as primary literature, and are recognized as “a rich source of technical, legal and business information presented in a generally standardized format and often not reproduced anywhere else” (World Intellectual Property Organization, 2015, p.4). Because of their status, patents are often left out of conversations surrounding source credibility and evaluation. Recent news relating to the conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and several patents, however, demonstrates the potential use of patents in spreading misinformation and disinformation. Through applying source evaluation techniques in keeping with the Association of College & Research Libraries’ …

Knowledge Recombination And Inventor Networks: The Asymmetric Effects Of Embeddedness On Knowledge Reuse And Impact, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Yimin Lin, Gerard George, Tufool Alnuaimi

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Inventors are triply embedded. They are embedded in a network of knowledge components that they can reuse in future inventions. They are embedded in an inventor network, where internal embeddedness (the strength of relationships between focal inventors and their colleagues upon whose knowledge the team builds) and network centrality influence access to information. Finally, they are embedded in the firm, with its specific routines that favor external or internal knowledge search, what we call search orientation. Using a sample of 39,785 semiconductor patents, we study the pattern of knowledge reuse, or the recombination of technologically similar components, on invention impact. …

Do Innovative Firms Communicate More? Evidence From The Relation Between Patenting And Management Guidance, Sterling Huang, Jeffrey Ng, Tharindra Ranashinghe, Mingyue Zhang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

Successful innovations could induce more disclosure if the information asymmetry between the firm and its investors about post-innovation outcomes leads investors to demand more information. However, such innovations also likely entail greater proprietary cost concerns, which deter disclosure. This paper uses patent grants to examine the effect of innovation success on management guidance behavior. We find that more management guidance follows patent grants, suggesting that despite disclosure cost concerns, firms with successful innovations do respond to information demand. This association is stronger after enactment of Regulation Fair Disclosure and for firms with greater institutional investor ownership, further highlighting the role …

The Innovation Effect Of Dual-Class Shares: New Evidence From Us Firms, Xiaping Cao, Tiecheng Leng, Jeremy C. Goh, Paul Malatesta

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The proliferation of dual-class structures in the US stock market presents a controversial trend since such shares are traditionally deemed to damage governance quality. We study the relationship between 362 firms with dual-class shares and their innovativeness using patent citations from Google Patents over the 1976 through 2006 period. We find dual-class shares have significant innovation effect in high-tech sectors, hard-to-innovate industries, firms with higher external takeover threat and firms heavily dependent on external equity financing. We also document a positive causality relationship between dual-class structures and the quality of innovation. The channel for this causal relationship is the protection …

Broadening The Patent Experience: The Value Of Piug And Attending The Patent Information Users Group (Piug) Annual Conference, Paulina Borrego, Rachel Knapp

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association

No abstract provided.

Justice Department's New Position On Patents, Standard Setting, And Injunctions, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

A deep split in American innovation policy has arisen between new economy and old economy innovation. In a recent policy statement, the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department takes a position that tilts more toward the old economy. Its December, 2019, policy statement on remedies for Standard Essential Patents issued jointly with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Institute of Standards and Technology reflects this movement.

The policy statement as a whole contains two noteworthy problems: one is a glaring omission, and the other is a mischaracterization of the scope of antitrust liability. Both positions are strongly …

Reviewing Inter Partes Review Five Years In: The View From University Technology Transfer Offices, Cynthia L. Dahl

All Faculty Scholarship

With the implementation of the inter partes review (IPR) proceeding under the America Invents Act in 2012, university technology transfer offices (TTOS) were worried that the value of their patents might be irreparably harmed. With IPR proceedings making patent challenges easy, relatively inexpensive, and a threat extending over the lifetime of a patent, TTOs wondered if IPRs might do nothing short of undermining their licensing business model.

However, although IPRs have irreparably changed the patent infringement landscape outside of the university setting, the effect on university patents has not been nearly as severe. This chapter explores why that might be …

Frand And Antitrust, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This paper considers when a patentee’s violation of a FRAND commitment also violates the antitrust laws. It warns against two extremes. First, is thinking that any violation of a FRAND obligation is an antitrust violation as well. FRAND obligations are contractual, and most breaches of contract do not violate antitrust law. The other extreme is thinking that, because a FRAND violation is a breach of contract, it cannot also be an antitrust violation.

Every antitrust case must consider the market environment in which conduct is to be evaluated. SSOs operated by multiple firms are joint ventures. Antitrust’s role is to …

When Do Expert Teams Fail To Create Impactful Inventions?, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx, Yimin Lin, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We investigate the salience of expertise in creating high impact inventions and question experts’ ability to deploy novel ideas. Specifically, we examine the relationships between expertise, component originality, and a team's structural holes’ position in the collaborative network and propose that, in relative terms, expert teams create lower impact inventions if they deploy more original components and if they occupy structural holes. We test and confirm our hypotheses in a sample of semiconductor firms. In post‐hoc analyses, we find a three‐way interaction where the negative effect of structural holes almost disappears when an expert team experiments with original components whereas …

Intellectual Property And Competition, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

A legal system that relies on private property rights to promote economic development must consider that profits can come from two different sources. First, both competition under constant technology and innovation promote economic growth by granting many of the returns to the successful developer. Competition and innovation both increase output, whether measured by quantity or quality. Second, however, profits can come from practices that reduce output, in some cases by reducing quantity, or in others by reducing innovation.

IP rights and competition policy were traditionally regarded as in conflict. IP rights create monopoly, which was thought to be inimical to …

Intellectual Property: Ownership And Protection In A University Setting, Cynthia L. Dahl

All Faculty Scholarship

Before an academic entrepreneur may protect or commercialize an invention, they must understand if they own the rights to it. This short chapter helps the inventor to consider the various scenarios that occur in a university setting. It advises the inventor how to seek a waiver from the university if they believe they are the true owner of the invention. If the facts indicate that the invention should be owned by the university, the chapter also discusses how a university decides to formally protect the invention through patent or copyright. Finally, the chapter advises the inventor how to stay involved …

Intellectual Property: Commercializing In A University Setting, Cynthia L. Dahl

All Faculty Scholarship

If an academic entrepreneur wants to commercialize their invention, they must first clarify who owns the invention, and then decide on the best commercialization possibility. This short chapter describes the various scenarios that might occur in a university setting. In most cases, a university will own the invention created by its researchers and faculty because of their employment. A university may then either license out the entrepreneur’s invention to a third-party company to further develop and commercialize, or may license the invention back to the entrepreneur so that they may commercialize it themselves through a start-up. Such license agreements will …

Regulation And The Marginalist Revolution, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

The marginalist revolution in economics became the foundation for the modern regulatory State with its “mixed” economy. Marginalism, whose development defines the boundary between classical political economy and neoclassical economics, completely overturned economists’ theory of value. It developed in the late nineteenth century in England, the Continent and the United States. For the classical political economists, value was a function of past averages. One good example is the wage-fund theory, which saw the optimal rate of wages as a function of the firm’s ability to save from previous profits. Another is the theory of corporate finance, which assessed a corporation’s …

Patent Trends Among Small And Large Innovative Firms During The 2007-2009 Recession, Anthony Breitzman

Anthony Breitzman

No abstract provided.

Appropriability And The Retrieval Of Knowledge After Spillovers, Tufool Alnuaimi, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Firms create and capture value through innovation. In technology-driven firms, there has been an explicit emphasis on appropriability through imitation deterrence and cumulative inventions that build on prior firm innovation. We introduce systematic empirical evidence for a third mechanism of appropriability namely, knowledge retrieval, which is defined as the re-absorption of previously spilled knowledge. We extend previous studies which consider technological complexity and organizational coupling as predictors of appropriability by examining their impact on knowledge retrieval. We find that technological complexity has a curvilinear relationship with retrieval while organizational coupling has a negative relationship. We discuss the implications of these …

The Patent Spiral, Roger Allan Ford

Law Faculty Scholarship

Examination — the process of reviewing a patent application and deciding whether to grant the requested patent — improves patent quality in two ways. It acts as a substantive screen, filtering out meritless applications and improving meritorious ones. It also acts as a costly screen, discouraging applicants from seeking low-value patents. Yet despite these dual roles, the patent system has a substantial quality problem: it is both too easy to get a patent (because examiners grant invalid patents that should be filtered out by a substantive screen) and too cheap to do so (because examiners grant low-value nuisance patents that …

A Handbook For Inventors And Innovators: Technology Commercialization At The University Of Nebraska–Lincoln

NUtech Ventures: Publications

OVERVIEW: Director’s Message * Commercialization * Technology Transfer Process * Benefits * Resources

SPONSORED RESEARCH: Process * Bayh-Dole Act * Funding Resources

INVENTION DISCLOSURE: Who * What * When * Why

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY: Patent * Other Forms of Intellectual Property * Criteria * Barriers to Patenting * Life of a Patent * University Ownership

COMMERCIALIZATION: Licenses and Licensing Process

NUtech Ventures’ mission is to commercialize technologies generated from the research and creative activities of the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Namely, NUtech Ventures seeks to facilitate the transfer of innovations from the “lab to the marketplace” for the benefit of society. This …

Alice Was No Rabbit Hole: Why Software Inventors Should Be Neither Surprised, Nor Alarmed, Sherman Helenese

Utah Law Review

Trade secrets offer an alternative to patent - ineligible innovations and to the problems and perils of protecting, defending and enforcing patents. Although there is currently limited trade secret legislation on the national level, nearly all states have adopted, with little substantive variation, the Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Unlike patent - eligibility requirements that precluded software in Gottschalk, Diehr, Alice, and Tenon from patent protection, no trade secret is automatically deemed out of scope. Trade secrets encompass anything of value, so long as it is not generally known and reasonable steps are taken, such as the use …

Comment To The Sec In Support Of The Enhanced Disclosure Of Patent And Technology License Information, Colleen V. Chien, Jorge Contreras, Carol Corrado, Stuart Graham, Deepak Hedge, Arti K. Rai, Saurabh Vishnubhakat

Faculty Scholarship

Intangible assets like IP constitute a large share of the value of firms, and the US economy generally. Accurate information on the intellectual property (IP) holdings and transactions of publicly-traded firms facilitates price discovery in the market and reduces transaction costs. While public understanding of the innovation economy has been expanded by a large stream of empirical research using patent data, and more recently trademark information this research is only as good as the accuracy and completeness of the data it builds upon. In contrast with information about patents and trademarks, good information about IP licensing is much less publicly …

Mapping The Patent Landscape Of Synthetic Biology For Fine Chemical Production Pathways, Pablo Carbonell, Abdullah Gok, Philip Shapira, Jean-Loup Faulon

Philip Shapira

The Rule Of Reason And The Scope Of The Patent, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

For a century and a half the Supreme Court has described perceived patent abuses as conduct that reaches "beyond the scope of the patent." That phrase, which evokes an image of boundary lines in real property, has been applied to both government and private activity and has many different meanings. It has been used offensively to conclude that certain patent uses are unlawful because they extend beyond the scope of the patent. It is also used defensively to characterize activities as lawful if they do not extend beyond the patent's scope. In the first half of the twentieth century the …

Antitrust And The Patent System: A Reexamination, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Since the federal antitrust laws were first passed they have cycled through extreme positions on the relationship between competition law and the patent system. Previous studies of antitrust and patents have generally assumed that patents are valid, discrete, and generally of high quality in the sense that they further innovation. As a result, increasing the returns to patenting increases the incentive to do socially valuable innovation. Further, if the returns to the patentee exceed the social losses caused by increased exclusion, the tradeoff is positive and antitrust should not interfere. If a patent does nothing to further innovation, however, then …

Do Patent Licensing Demands Mean Innovation?, Robin C. Feldman, Mark A. Lemley

Robin C Feldman

Teece's Competing Through Innovation, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This essay reviews David J. Teece's book, Competing Through Innovation: Technological Strategies and Antitrust Policies (2013).