Veranstaltungen

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

The effects of increases in external funding on firm-level patenting are empirically investigated. Results indicate that the impact of finance on inventive activities is more multilayered than commonly suggested. In fact, changes in the level of funding affect value-relevant characteristics of patents filed. In a quasi-natural experimental setup, staggered and country-specific legislative amendments of the European financial market harmonization during the 2000s are utilized as an exogenous shift improving firms’ access to funding. First, it will be shown that financial integration leads to increased bank lending to ex ante financially constrained firms. Second, it will be analyzed whether affected firms changed their patenting activities. The finding is, that increased funding is associated with more patents in quantitative terms but of lower average technological quality and value. Further, affected firms alternate towards filing fewer explorative (i.e., impactful and generally applicable) but rather incremental patents. By providing new insights on the relation between finance and firm-level inventions, the results therefore suggest that it is important to acknowledge potentially diverse effects arising from improved access to funding.

Ansprechpartnerin: Zhaoxin Pu

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, Raum E09/E10

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Executive Summary

Urteilsbesprechung zu Art. 3(a) SPC Legislation: An Analysis of the CJEU’s Ruling in Teva (C-121/2017) and a Proposal for Its Implementation im Fall Teva

Kontakt: Roberto Romandini

 

The Institute’s Study on Supplementary Protection Certificates was published on May 28th, 2018. It examines the functioning of the system of supplementary protection certificates (SPCs) established by EU Regulation 1768/92/EEC on SPCs for medicinal products (now: Reg. 469/2009/EC) and Regulation 1610/96/EC on SPCs for plant protection products from a legal perspective.
 

The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition invites stakeholders to discuss the study’s conclusions and recommendations as well as the perspectives for the SPC system and the unitary SPC.

Government policy in support of innovation often varies across technology areas. An important example are climate change policies that typically try to support so called clean technologies that avoid greenhouse gas pollution and hamper dirty technologies that are associated with polluting emissions. At the margin, private returns of R&D investments in different areas should be equalized. Hence, shifting the composition of R&D activities by a policy intervention will only have a meaningful impact on economic outcomes if the external returns differ. This paper compares innovation spillovers between clean, dirty and other emerging technologies using patent citation data. We develop a new methodology to capture knowledge spillovers using the Google’s Page rank algorithm. Exploring a wide range of robustness checks we consistently find up to 60% higher levels of spillovers from clean technologies. We also use firm-level financial data to investigate the impact of knowledge spillovers on firms’ market value and find that marginal economic value of spillovers from clean technologies is also greater.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

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

The goal of this paper is to analyze whether the policy changes that have occurred in the European SEP licensing regulation affect the way agents negotiate SEP licenses with each other. In fact, the European SEP licensing regulation landscape has gone through three major policy changes since 2009: the Orange book standard (only Germany), the Samsung/Motorola decisions (EU-wide) and the Huawei v. ZTE judgement (EU-wide). Even though these reforms sought the same objective – namely sustaining innovation, healthy competition and protecting consumers from monopoly power – their means are, to some extent, quite divergent. Whilst the first policy change established rather strict conditions on the patent implementers, the second one reversed the situation completely, providing a safe harbour to patent users. In an attempt to clarify the issues raised by such a drastic reversal, the third policy change attempts to reach a balance between the previous two regulations, in order to provide a fair environment to the contracting parties.

We apply a simple Nash bargaining environment to SEP license negotiations in order to study how the changing institutions affect the outcome of such negotiations. By parameterizing policy changes, we are able to see how these alter the disagreement points of the negotiation game and, potentially, define the feasible bargaining range of successful negotiations.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

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

In this paper, we consider how the timing of a donation decision relative to the production of disposable income affects charitable giving. In a real-effort laboratory experiment with a subsistence income constraint, we study the willingness to donate, the amounts donated as well as the change in labor supply of donors triggered by giving. We find that more people donate if the decision to donate is made before production as a binding pledge. We elaborate on the mechanism that channels the increase in performance. Our results suggest that a commitment to giving is a viable strategy for raising charitable funds. (joint with Andreas Nicklisch and Kai-Uwe Schnapp)

Cheryl Foong is a Lecturer at Curtin Law School in Western Australia, where she teaches Intellectual Property law and Competition law. Cheryl publishes in the area of digital copyright, open access and internet law, and regularly speaks at national and international IP conferences. Cheryl has a Master of Laws from Columbia Law School in New York, and previously interned at the United States Copyright Office (Office of Policy and International Affairs) in Washington, DC. She is a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honours graduate from Queensland University of Technology in Australia, and recently completed her PhD at the Australian Catholic University.

Her presentation analyses the making available right as introduced by the WIPO Internet Treaties and evaluates current judicial approaches to the right in Australia, the US and the EU. It discusses the underlying justifications driving the disparate decisions on the right, and reveals the pitfalls of existing approaches. Distilling lessons from current approaches, this presentation proposes principles for the interpretation of the making available right. These principles are aimed at aligning the development of the making available right with the vast communications potential afforded by the Internet.

Moderation: Valentina Moscon

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

The recent upsurge of patent litigation cases initiated by patent assertion entities (PAEs) in the US has led to an intense debate about their effect on innovation dynamics and on the IP system functioning. We contribute to this debate by providing original evidence based on the patenting activity of PAEs in Europe, a region where the patent assertion landscape is growing rapidly and the imminent introduction of the Unified Patent Court and the Unitary Patent will upset the current schemes. Relying on European Patent Office data on patent transfers and patent citations in the high-tech sector, our results show that PAEs acquire patents with high average technological quality. They may thus increase liquidity in the patent market, enhancing efficiency in the capital market for inventions. However, after a transfer occurs, patents transferred to PAEs receive significantly fewer citations than never transferred patents. Interestingly, when we focus directly on transferred patents, we find that there is not significant difference in the after-transfer pattern of citations between patents transferred to PAEs and patents transferred to other entities. On the one hand, the overall evidence suggests that PAEs do not operate as patent intermediaries. On the other, however, also transfers to producing companies seem not to increase the efficiency of the market for technology, opening relevant questions about its entire functioning. These results are robust to different measures of citations considered and to different econometric techniques applied. (joint with Gianluca Orsatti)

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

Advances in science and innovation are traditionally viewed as starting from a question or problem or challenge. We have a problem to solve, a question to answer, and we seek ways to address these. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that some of the most creative and revolutionary solutions and innovations arise by a different process, where solutions did not come by seeking to address a problem. For example, Velcro was invented by de Mestral following an experience with a plant burr that stuck to his clothing. Seeing the mechanism by which the burr clung to fabric suggested a new way to design fasteners. Both the need and the solution were novel to him at the time of his observation and insight. Recent work by von Hippel and von Krogh (2016) has argued that such discoveries may arise from a heretofore unstudied form of solution-finding. They proposed that such discoveries arise without the need for a priori problem-formulation. Instead, a chance observation or encounter prompts an insight that provides a solution which by its recognition identifies the need it satisfies simultaneously. They termed this kind of situation “a need-solution pair.” It will be argued that need-solution pair innovation may be a highly prevalent and creative form of solution-finding that emerges from the natural capacity of perceivers to apprehend (consciously or unconsciously) the functions of objects as part of the natural process of object recognition and understanding. Implications of this unstudied process for models of general solution-finding will be discussed and direction for further research and improved approaches to innovation be offered.

Ansprechpartnerin: Fabian Gaessler

Moderation: Francisco Beneke

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

While data interoperability solutions will certainly consist on a combination of these three paths, the intended workshop focuses primarily on the role that both data standards and APIs play in achieving IoT data interoperability. By exchanging views with business, data and standardization experts in the IoT field, the workshop should provide us with the necessary technical and market knowledge to assess the economic, legal and regulatory implications of data standardization and the emerging “API economy”.

Each workshop will address the different kinds of standards which in the Institute’s view are relevant for the IoT. The focus of the second workshop will be the IoT data interoperability.

The workshop will be held at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. Participation is by invitation only.

See Program