Technology and Innovation Commons^™

Star Inventors, Knowledge Complexity And Collaborative Ties: What Drives Deference In Invention Teams?, Metin Onal Vural, Simon J.D. Schillebeeckx

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper provides an empirical investigation of factors that drive deference in an invention team setting. Drawing on innovation literature, we hypothesise and test the distinct factors that determine the extent of deference an inventor receives in an invention team. Using patent data from U.S. semiconductor industry, we show that star inventors command deference among their peers and that this effect is moderated by stars’ embeddedness in knowledge, social and geographical context. Deference is amplified when stars have complex knowledge, but not necessarily when they have strong ties. When the stars are geographically distant from their peers, the amount of …

How To Read A Patent: A Survey Of The Textual Characteristics Of Patent Documents And Strategies For Comprehension, Graham Sherriff

Journal of the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Association

Reading patents is an important activity for inventors and anyone seeking to file or defend a patent, as well as for “exploratory” researchers such as students in a range of disciplines. However, they are notoriously difficult to read. This paper examines the characteristics of patent documents that impair their readability and seeks to identify comprehension strategies and techniques that may alleviate this difficulty. Insights were gathered from a review of the scholarly literature on reading and patent literacy, a survey of patent educators affiliated with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)’s Patent and Trademark Research Center (PTRC) Program, and …

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.

Competition And Innovation In The Financial Sector: Evidence From The Rise Of Fintech Start-Ups, Doina Caragea, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Mihai Dobri, Andreas Hoepner, Oana Peia, Davide Romelli

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of entry on incumbents’ incentives to innovate by examining the rise of FinTech innovations over the period 2000-2016. We employ machine learning algorithms to classify a large sample of patent applications into five types of FinTech innovations. We then show that greater competition from innovators outside the financial sector increases the probability that incumbent financial firms will innovate. Our identification strategy exploits the variation over time in the share of FinTech patent applications by non-financial start-ups relative to incumbent financial firms, as a proxy for competitive pressures from outside the financial industry. …

“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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

Do Managers Use Meeting Analyst Forecasts To Signal Private Information? Evidence From Patent Citations, Katherine Gunny, Tracey Chunqi Zhang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study examines whether firms manage earnings to meet analyst forecasts to signal superior future performance. Prior research finds that firms use earnings management to just meet analyst forecasts and that these firms have a positive association with future performance (Bartov et al., 2002). There are two potential explanations for the positive association – signaling and attaining benefits that allow for better future performance (i.e., the real benefits explanation). Prior studies cannot provide evidence of signaling because they do not control for the real benefits explanation. Our research design enables us to control for the real benefits explanation because we …

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

College of Science & Mathematics Departmental Research

No abstract provided.

Not With My Own: Long-Term Effects Of Cross-Country Collaboration On Subsidiary Innovation In Emerging Economies Versus Advanced Economies, Tufool Alnuaimi, Jasjit Singh, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Prior literature has established that international collaboration on R&D is an important means for generating new and impactful ideas through the cross-border integration of knowledge. We show that cross-country collaboration improves not just the resulting ideas, but also has a long-term benefit for the involved inventors in terms of continuing to generate higher-impact ideas in the future. However, our results also show that the improved performance of specific inventors in a multinational corporation subsidiary does not translate to broader subsidiary-level capabilities at innovation. One possible explanation might be that inventors obtaining international exposure often do not develop collaborative ties with …

Entry Into New Niches: The Effects Of Firm Age And The Expansion Of Technological Capabilities On Innovative Output And Impact, Reddi Kotha, Yangfeng Zheng, Gerard George

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We provide evidence that young firms systematically differ from older firms in their innovative output when they enter ‘new to the firm’ technological niches. We analyze data from 128 biotechnology firms since their inception and track these firms over time. Our analyses reveal that the organizational age at which the firm branches into new technological niches significantly influences its innovative activity. We refine the focus of the extant literature by separately examining the effects of branching on the quantity of innovative output and the impact that this output has on the technology domain. Subsequent to branching into new niches, we …

Why Do Inventors Reference Papers And Patents In Their Patent Applications?, Anthony Breitzman

College of Science & Mathematics Departmental Research

Patent citation analysis is a widely used technique in the evaluation of science and technology. The basic premise behind its use is that papers or patents cited as prior art by many later patents tend to contain important ideas upon which numerous inventors have built. This does not mean that every important document is highly cited, or that every highly cited document is important. However, numerous validation studies have revealed the existence of a strong positive relationship between citations and technological importance (see Breitzman and Mogee (2002) for a review of validation studies).

Does Patent Strategy Shape The Long-Run Supply Of Public Knowledge? Evidence From Human Genetics, Kenneth G. Huang, Fiona Murray

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Knowledge-based firms seeking competitive advantage often draw on the public knowledge stream (ideas embedded in public commons institutions) as the foundation for private knowledge (ideas firms protect through private intellectual property [IP] institutions). However, understanding of the converse relationship—the impact of private knowledge strategies on public knowledge production—is limited. We examine this question in human genetics, where policy makers debate expanding IP ownership over the human genome. Our difference-in-differences estimates show that gene patents decrease public genetic knowledge, with broader patent scope, private sector ownership, patent thickets, fragmented patent ownership, and a gene's commercial relevance exacerbating their effect.

Why Small Technology Firms Are Producing More High Impact Patents - And How Resources Such As Ieee Help Small Firms Compete, Anthony Breitzman

College of Science & Mathematics Departmental Research

A fascinating trend has emerged in the area of patent production. A recent study by 1790 Analytics shows that small firms are producing a larger percentage of emerging technology patents given their participation in the patent system. For example: while small firms in the U.S. represent less than 2% of all Computer Hardware patents, they account for almost 12% of all of the Computer Hardware patents considered likely to contain leading edge technology. What’s driving the small firm’s patent success? This paper describes how use of scientific papers from resources such as IEEE helps small technology firms compete.

Technology Worth Patenting, Thomas G. Field Jr

Law Faculty Scholarship

Inevitably scarce resources are better invested in deciding which [patent] applications are worth filing and seeking the broadest defensible claims for those that are chosen. Whether a patent can be obtained for less than, say, $10,000 is the wrong question. Whether a patent is worth having is the better question—particularly from the standpoint of prospective licensees.

Adequacy Of The 1995 Antitrust Guidelines For Ip Licensing: Commentaries From The 2002 Ftc And Doj Hearings, Clovia Hamilton

Winthrop Faculty and Staff Publications

In 1995, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) adopted new guidelines for the licensing of intellectual property rights without violating antitrust laws. The 1995 Antitrust Guidelines for the Licensing of Intellectual Property (IP Guidelines) state the antitrust enforcement policy of the DOJ and the FTC.1 The IP Guidelines drafted by the DOJ and FTC (the agencies) does not provide practitioners with a sufficient level of comfort as they attempt to predict the enforcement initiatives relative to intellectual property licensing.2 The IP Guidelines are inadequate because they misunderstand the nature of intellectual property markets and provide …

Brief Of Law Professors As Amicus Curiae In Support Of Respondent, Thomas G. Field Jr, William O. Hennessey, Craig S. Jepson, Karl F. Jorda

Law Faculty Scholarship

Inventors lacking assurance of a market, or even the right to practice patented inventions, face considerable risk. Those who qualify for patents, in return for disclosure, receive only the assistance of the courts in excluding others from economic exploitation of their inventions. Already subject to many legislative and judicial limitations, patents should not be further subject to the functional equivalent of private inverse condemnation without congressional action.

Converting Intellectual Assets Into Property, Thomas G. Field Jr

Law Faculty Scholarship

The mouse and graphic interface were first commercialized on Macintosh computers. Yet, Steve Jobs is said to have derived both from the Alto computer developed by Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. While Jobs became a billionaire, "Xerox completely failed to get into the personal computer business, missing one of the biggest business opportunities in history."

Preferring to be more akin to Apple than to Xerox, firms are increasingly mindful that their most valuable assets are apt to be ideas and information instead of land, buildings and inventory. Not capable of being fenced in or locked up, intangible assets can be …