Veranstaltungen

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

It has been hypothesized by von Hippel and von Krogh (2016) that problem solving often occurs via the simultaneous recognition of both a need and a responsive solution – without prior formulation of a problem being required. If this hypothesis is correct, significant new opportunities are opened up for both research and practice. The absence of a requirement for problem formulation can significantly reduce the effort and complexity of problem-solving. It also eliminates constraints on the range of possible solutions that a problem statement inevitably imposes, and so may enable the discovery of more creative, novel, and valuable solutions. In this talk, I will give an introduction to the phenomenon of need-solution pairs and then report on a first test of the von Hippel and von Krogh hypothesis that we conducted via a laboratory experiment. In summary, we find that need-solution-pairs can be triggered in everyday life situations and that both the novelty and creativity of solutions discovered via need-solution pair recognition are significantly higher than solutions discovered via the traditionally assumed need-first pattern. I will conclude by demonstrating the practical implications of this new phenomenon and our experimental research.

 
Ansprechpartner: Felix Poege

Moderation: Dennis Kann

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

 
Ansprechpartner: Zhaoxin Pu

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

How do firms choose their organization design to innovate better? We use The Patents (Amendment) Act, 2002 that initiated a stronger patents regime in India as a quasi-natural experiment to identify the causal effect of higher incentives for innovation on firm structure. We find that: stronger intellectual property (IP) proection leads to an increase in managers' share of compensation. Moreover, this increase is about 1.6-1.7% more for firms that were already above the median (in their respective industries) in terms of technology adoption. This increase in managerial compensation is due to a sharp increase in incentive pay. While there is an increase in both managerial layers and the number of divisions within a firm, it is the latter which explains th edifference in managerial compensation between high-tech and low-tech firms. In other words, stronger IP leads to an increase in both within-firm and between-firm wage inequality, with more robust evidence for between-firm inequality.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

We analyze the extent to which private defensive litigation insurance deters patent assertion by non-practicing entities (NPEs). We do so by studying the effect that a patent-specific insurance product, offered by a leading litigation insurer, had on the litigation behavior of insured patents' owners, all of which are NPEs. We first model the impact of defensive litigation insurance on the behavior of patent enforcers and accused infringers. Next, we empirically evaluate the insurance policy's effect on the owners of insured patents by comparing their subsequent assertion of insured patents with their subsequent assertion of other patents they own that were not included in the policy. We additionally compare the assertion of insured patents with patents held by other NPEs with portfolios that were entirely excluded from the insurance product. Our findings suggest that the introduction of this insurance policy had a large, negative effect on the likelihood that a patent included in the policy was subsequently asserted, and our results are robust across all control groups that we constructed. Our results have importance for ongoing debates on the need to reform the U.S. and European patent systems, and suggest that market-based mechanisms could help deter so-called “patent trolling.”

 
Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

Patents play an important role in the market for technologies by facilitating the transfer of knowledge from innovators to practicing firms and enabling commercialization of innovative ideas. The timing of commercialization has been shown to be highly dependent on the exact timing of patent grant, when the major part of uncertainly over the scope of allowed claims is resolved (Gans, Hsu & Stern, 2008). But does the pendency of a patent application at the patent office also decrease the overall salability of a technology? In this paper, I study the effect of the USPTO's Prioritized Examination (Track One) Program on the likelihood that a patent will be commercialized. I compare applications that have undergone accelerated examination process under this program to applications with similar observable characteristics filed before the inception of the program. I find that prioritized applications have a higher propensity to be reassigned, suggesting that longer pendency at the patent office may reduce the commercialization of inventions.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Details zur Veranstaltung auf der Webseite des MIPLC

Moderation: Heiko Richter
Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum E10

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

Recent highly publicized cases of scientific misconduct have raised concerns about its consequences for academic careers. Previous and anecdotal evidence suggests that these reach far beyond the fraudulent scientist and (his or) her career, affecting coauthors and institutions. Here we show that the negative effects of scientific misconduct spill over to uninvolved prior collaborators: compared to a control group, prior collaborators of misconducting scientists, who have no connection to the misconduct case, are cited 8 to 9% less often afterwards. We suggest that the mechanism underlying this phenomenon is stigmatization by mere association. The result suggests that scientific misconduct generates large indirect costs in the form of mistrust towards a wider range of research findings than was previously assumed. The far-reaching fallout of misconduct implies that potential whistleblowers might be disinclined to make their concerns public in order to protect their own reputation and career.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum 313

The European patent system consists of national offices and the European Patent Office (EPO), which cooperate on legal questions, while competing on fees and service quality. This competition could result in differentiation of the service offered by offices and in market segmentation, which might benefit patent applicants. To date there is little evidence on whether firms regularly choose between EPO and national offices, nor which parameters influence this choice. Such evidence is needed, if the functioning of the EPS as a whole is to be assessed. We provide the first analysis of competition between patent offices within the EPS. The paper provides a recursive model of the two principal choices made by patent applicants in the EPS: the selection of examining offices and of jurisdictions in which patent protection is obtained. We then derive and estimate instrumental variables models to establish the relative importance of fees, grant rates, examination duration and firm and patent characteristics in these choices. We identify sectors and types of firms that predominantly rely on the national offices or the EPO, but we also identify significant levels of switching, driven by variation in grant rates across offices and by fee changes as well as variation in the duration of examination. We discuss implications of our work for theoretical and empirical analyses of patent systems, and we discuss how the likely introduction of a Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court will affect the system and its governance mechanisms.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler