Veranstaltungen

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

There is a longstanding debate about whether technological innovation enables the rise of new entrants, or reinforces incumbent advantages. The ongoing digital transformation of medicine represents a unique opportunity to revisit this debate in the context of health care, an industry that now represents nearly 18% of the U.S. economy. In 2016, over 700 medical devices containing software were cleared for marketing by the FDA, almost double the number approved a decade earlier. What types of firms are most likely to lead digital innovation in health care? And do traditional factors such as geographic specialization, experience, and firm revenues predict this type of innovation? We use unstructured text data on new medical devices, recovered through automated scraping, to study digital innovation in this industry. Using supervised document classification and other natural language processing tools, we analyze the content of over 33,000 devices over the years 2002-2016. We first document the growth of software and networking capabilities and find significant heterogeneities across medical specialty areas. We then use detailed firm data to understand the characteristics of the firms bringing digital technologies to market and find strong evidence for the importance of firm experience with software products. VC funding and location in a cluster are predictors of follow-on digital innovation, but not novel innovation, while public firms are more likely to engage in first-time product digitizations. We find several pieces of evidence that support within-firm positive spillovers from software inclusion in one product to another, consistent with a low marginal cost of doing so.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

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

We document the causal effect of simple bonus incentives on performance in a non-routine, cognitively demanding, interactive team task. These tasks are more and more important in the economy and at the same time understudied. We conduct a field experiment and show a causal positive effect of incentives on the completion probability and the overall completion time of the task. Using several experimental treatment variations we shed light on the importance of different bonus components. We study the framing of bonuses (as gains or losses) and investigate whether bonus incentives work due to i)the monetary reward or ii) the reference performance bonus incentives provide. We also investigate the robustness of the effect in an additional sample and study the reactions to bonus incentives by differently composed teams. Finally, we shed light on how bonus incentives affect teams' willingness to explore in the non-routine task. (joint with F. Englmaier, S. Grimm and D. Schindler)

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Marco Kleine

MIPLC, Marstallstr. 8, Room 220

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Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum E10

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

This paper estimates the effect of trade policy during the Great Liberalization of the 1990s on innovation in nearly 100 countries using international firm-level patent data. The empirical strategy exploits ex-ante differences in firms’ exposure to countries and industries, allowing us to construct firm-specific measures of tariff cuts. This provides a novel source of variation that enables us to establish the causal impact of trade policy on innovation. Our results suggest that trade liberalization has economically significant effects on innovation and, ultimately, technical change and growth. According to our estimates, a substantial share of global knowledge creation during the 1990s can be explained by trade policy reforms. Furthermore, we find that the increase in patenting reflects innovation, rather than simply more protection of existing knowledge. Both improved market access and more import competition contribute to the positive innovation response to trade liberalization (joint work with Andreas Moxnes and Karen Helene Ulltveit-Moe).

Ansprechpartner: Laura Rosendahl Huber, Ph.D.

From May 29 to 31, 2017, the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich, the Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition will jointly organize the second Munich Summer Institute.

The Summer Institute 2017 will focus on three areas:

• Digitization, Strategy and Organization (chairs: Jörg Claussen and Tobias Kretschmer),
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship (chair: Dietmar Harhoff), and
• Law & Economics of Intellectual Property and Innovation (chair: Stefan Bechtold).

The goal of the Munich Summer Institute is to stimulate a rigorous in-depth discussion of a select number of research papers and to strengthen the interdisciplinary international research community in these areas.

Researchers in economics, law, management and related fields at all stages of their career (from Ph.D. students to full professors) may attend the Munich Summer Institute as presenters in a plenary or a poster session, as discussants or as attendants.

The Munich Summer Institute will feature three keynote lecturers, 18 plenary presentations and a daily poster session (including a poster slam). Paper presentations will be grouped by topics, not discipline or method.

The Munich Summer Institute will be held at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in the heart of Munich. Partizipation is by invitation only. The organizers will fund travel and hotel expenses for all plenary speakers and hotel expenses for all poster presenters and invited discussants.

Key speakers are:

• Michael Frakes (Duke University),
• Ajia Leiponen (Cornell University), and
• Mirjam van Praag (Copenhagen Business School).

Paper selections will be announced at the beginning of March. The program of the Munich Summer Institute will be available on April 1, 2017. Final papers are due for circulation among conference participants on May 1, 2017. Accepted papers will be made available to conference participants on a protected website. Researchers who would like to attend the Munich Summer Institute without giving a presentation should contact one of the organizers by May 1, 2017.

More information is available at http://munich-summer-institute.org. Any questions concerning the Munich Summer Institute should be directed to Stefan Bechtold, Jörg Claussen, Dietmar Harhoff or Tobias Kretschmer.

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum E10

Eine klare Trennung von exekutiver und judikativer Gewalt ist ein Kernmerkmal des modernen Rechtsstaates und grundlegende Voraussetzung für einen fairen und effektiven Rechtsschutz. Dass eine solche Trennung im Rahmen des auf dem EPÜ basierenden Verfahrens zur Erteilung Europäischer Patente hinreichend verwirklicht ist, wird zuweilen bezweifelt. Auch das Bundesverfassungsgericht hat sich mit der Thematik bereits auseinandergesetzt (vgl. Az. 2 BvR 2368/99). Im vergangenen Jahr hat das Europäische Patentamt (EPA) nun eine Reform umgesetzt, wonach die Beschwerdekammern einschließlich ihrer Geschäftsstellen und Unterstützungsdienste als gesonderte Einheit organisiert und vom Präsidenten der Beschwerdekammern geleitet werden. Parallel dazu steht das Einheitliche Patentgericht (EPG) in den Startlöchern, welches ebenfalls als völkerrechtlich verselbständigtes Rechtssubjekt konzipiert ist. Auch dessen Entscheidungen erzeugen gegenüber den Grundrechtsberechtigten in der innerstaatlichen Rechtsordnung Rechtswirkungen und müssen sich folglich an den wesentlichen grundgesetzlichen Gewährleistungen messen lassen.
Der Vortrag wird die jüngste Reform der Beschwerdekammern des EPA vor dem Hintergrund der für internationale Organisationen geltenden rechtsstaatlichen Anforderungen beleuchten. Dabei werden zugleich Bezüge zum Verfahren vor dem EPG hergestellt. Insbesondere die im Grundsatz vorgesehene Parallelität von Einspruchs- und Nichtigkeitsverfahren zeigt neue prozessuale Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten aber auch Herausforderungen auf.

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

US doctrine on international trademark disputes is founded on a precedent from 1952. Steele v. Bulova Watch Co. is the first and only Supreme Court decision on the question of how far US trademark law should be extended beyond the US’s national borders when an international infringement is at issue. Even though cases have drastically multiplied there has been no comprehensive account of the actual state of the law. Courts and commentators continue to rely on a small set of leading cases, Steele and a few appellate court decisions, neglecting the landscape of lower courts’ decision-making. An empirical study of the field’s complete case law from 1952 until 2016 helps to address this blind spot. The results show that much of the conventional wisdom is questionable, if not incorrect. The analysis not only provides new and unexpected insights into the actual extension of US trademark law but also explains which factors drive the outcome in practice, how these factors interact with one another, and how each factor has been micro-shaped over time. Based on these findings, several crucial corrections to existing doctrine can be suggested. Most succinctly put, one can say that, in the interest of aligning judicial practice with the realities of socioeconomic globalization, the current overextension of the Lanham Act must be curbed. The doctrine of trademark extraterritoriality that has evolved in the wake of Steele v. Bulova is an anticompetitive detriment rather than a right-owner panacea.

Ansprechpartner: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Max-Planck-Institut für Innovation und Wettbewerb, München, Raum E10