Events

This seminar delves into the scientific resilience and collaborative partnerships in the context of Ukraine’s post-war recovery. Dr. Oleksandra Antoniouk, Chairwoman of the Scientific Committee of the National Council of Ukraine for Science and Technology Development, will explore the effect of armed conflict on scientific endeavors and the innovative strategies employed during times of adversity. The discussion will extend to recovery initiatives, focusing on the pivotal role of European partnerships in rebuilding scientific infrastructure and fostering economic rejuvenation.

The talk will address the impact of the war on scientific research and the subsequent challenges the scientific community faces. Insights into the innovative solutions that emerged during the conflict and their contribution to addressing immediate challenges will be presented. Furthermore, during the seminar, the strategies and collaborative efforts employed to restore and strengthen Ukraine’s research capabilities post-war will be discussed, with a specific emphasis on the support and involvement of European partners.

Key topics include the transfer of technology, the adaptation of existing innovations, and the economic revitalization brought about by scientific and technological advancements. Dr. Antoniouk will analyze the role of policies and governance structures in facilitating recovery, highlighting legislative measures to foster collaboration with European counterparts. The discussion will extend to the human capital aspect, exploring strategies for attracting and retaining skilled researchers, as well as educational initiatives to nurture the next generation of scientific leaders. By focusing on the Ukrainian experience and its European partnership, the seminar will provide valuable insights into the multifaceted strategies required for post-war economic rejuvenation through science and innovation.

Contact person: Anatasiia Lutsenko

The presentation will be held in German. Professor Hanns Ullrich will moderate.

Der Vortrag argumentiert, dass die (strenge) Territorialität des Patentrechts heute nicht mehr zwingend ist. Sie ist in erster Linie ein historisches Überbleibsel des Erfindungsschutzes vor dem 20. und 21. Jahrhundert. Mit dem Übergang zur globalen Neuheit hat sich die Funktion des Erfindungsschutzes in einem schleichenden Prozess fundamental verändert. Deshalb ist es heute möglich, die Territorialität des Patentrechts zu lockern und ausländische Patente anzuerkennen, ihnen also Wirkung innerhalb der eigenen Rechtsordnung zuzusprechen. Das bietet dem Patentrecht eine rechtspolitisch sinnvolle Entwicklungsmöglichkeit.

Der Vortrag widmet sich dem in drei Teilen: Erstes erläutert er, was Territorialität im Patentrecht bedeutetet. Zweitens werden die Gründe für die territoriale Konzeption analysiert, zunächst historisch und dann aus heutiger Perspektive, rechtsdogmatisch und rechtspolitisch. Drittens werden zwei methodische Möglichkeiten zur Anerkennung ausländischer Patente vorgestellt.

Mit Kirsten Rulf, Expertin für Künstliche Intelligenz, Partnerin und Associate Director bei BCG und zuvor Leiterin des Referats für Grundsatzfragen der Digitalpolitik im Bundeskanzleramt.

Diskutieren Sie mit Kirsten Rulf und Dietmar Harhoff über den Einsatz von KI in Deutschland. Rulf und Harhoff sprechen über Erfolgschancen und Hindernisse auf dem Weg hin zum produktiven Einsatz von KI. Deutschland hat sich bei der Digitalisierung im letzten Jahrzehnt nicht leicht getan. Wiederholen wir die Fehler, die dabei gemacht wurden? Oder gelingt es in dieser neuen Welle der Digitalisierung, Produktivitätspotenziale für Unternehmen, Wissenschaft und Verwaltung zügig zu erschließen?

The event will be held online via zoom and is in German.

The Max Planck Digitality Fireside Chat is an informal event format for in-depth talks and discussions on digitality and digital transformation. The aim is to allow for an exchange between researchers and digital pioneers who have come forward with new concepts, proposals and ideas, and are actively shaping digitalization.

New business formation is a key driver of regional transformation and development. While we know that a region’s attractiveness for new businesses depends on its resources, infrastructure, and human capital, we know little about the role of local business networks in promoting or impeding the birth of new firms. We construct local business networks connecting more than 350 million nodes consisting of managers, owners and firms using administrative data on all German businesses from 2002 to 2020. Differentiating between serial and de-novo entrepreneurs, we show a positive but decreasing relation between a region’s connectedness and firm entry of serial entrepreneurs. Networks are, moreover, positively linked to firm survival. Relating our findings to a measure of ownership concentration, we show that networks provide additional explanations for regional variation in new business formations. These patterns are robust to synthetic instrumental variable estimations.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Organized by the Munich IPDR Forum, which is an organization founded by scholars from the Max Planck Institute as well as IP practitioners and whose goal it is to bring together academia and practice on all issues regarding intellectual property rights and dispute resolution.

Join us as we delve into the European Commission’s current proposal for an SEP regulation and explore the incorporated ADR components. Help us compare this proposal to other examples of IP ADR, and contextualize it within the realm of standardization. 

We are delighted to present the opportunity to discuss the proposed SEP-Regulation with:

• Dr. Beatriz Conde Gallego, Senior Research Fellow and member of the drafting group of the MPI for Innovation and Competition’s Position Paper on the Proposed SEP-Regulation
• A member of the EU Commission (DG Grow) – participation to be confirmed
• Dr. Matthias Schneider, Chairman of ETSI TC Human Factors and former member of the European Commission’s SEPs Expert Group (Group of Experts on Licensing and Valuation of Standard Essential Patents)
• Dr. Axel Walz, judge at the 6^th Senate of the Higher Regional Court Munich and co-author of a proposal for ADR in SEP disputes
• Dr. Matthias Zigann, presiding judge of the 38^th Senate of the Higher Regional Court Munich and of the Local Division Munich of  the Unified Patent Court

We investigate the impact of short-term visits on scientific advancements by analyzing the staggered implementation of the US Visa Waiver Program (VWP) across 41 countries from 1988-2023. Our focus is on global collaborations involving US and non-US researchers benefiting from the VWP. Our results reveal a substantial influence on academic publications and conference proceedings, with no evidence of a substitution (crowd-out) effect. The number of publications by single authors or those exclusively affiliated with VWP countries did not experience a significant change. Further, we find a more pronounced effect in fields such as nursing, veterinary science, health professions, economics, and management, compared to relatively smaller effects observed in chemistry, physics, biochemistry, and mathematics. Notably, the impact on conference proceedings materializes more rapidly and with greater magnitude than on journal publications. Fields previously characterized by solo-author dominance exhibit a heightened effect. These findings underscore the crucial role of short-term face-to-face interactions between researchers from different countries and provide implications for academic seminars and conferences, visa and immigration policies, research and development (R\&D) strategies, and the future of work.

Contact person: Daehyun Kim

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Megaprojects, Digital Platforms, and Productivity: Evidence from the Human Brain Project
Presenter: Ann-Christin Kreyer (MPI) 
Discussant: Elisa Gerten (ISTO)

How to build institutions to facilitate large-scale, long-term life science projects? This paper studies the impact of the Human Brain Project (HBP), a 10-year (2013-2023) flagship project funded by the European Union, which offers a valuable setting for institutions that provide long-term infrastructure and grant support to neuroscience, computing, and brain-related medicine. We construct new data that track the individuals involved in the HBP, the timing of active engagement, and research output (e.g., publications). We exploit plausibly exogenous variation based on the phase-relevant resource allocation and individual engagement. We use current methods in the difference-in-difference (DiD) with two-way fixed effects, combined with natural language processing tools (esp. topic classification) to capture the evolution in research topics: fundamental neuroscience, neurotech, AI-robotics, and patient care. We find that the HBP has gained attraction over time, with more individuals actively participating from more geographically diverse bases, particularly junior faculties and graduate students. We find that participation in the HBP leads to increased individual productivity in publications per year, an expanded coauthor network, more citations, and a higher likelihood of publishing in a top neuroscience journal. All topic areas share the increased research productivity and impact, especially in the neurotech topic areas that combine neuroscience and CS/AI. These results are particularly driven by junior scholars (junior faculties and graduate students). The overall patterns are qualitatively similar for the subsample containing female scholars, despite smaller magnitudes and less precision. Scholars based in Germany, Italy, and Belgium demonstrated more pronounced increases in publications per author year for neuroscience and AI researchers. This paper has broad policy implications with new evidence that upstream digital collaborative institution design can help facilitate high-impact interdisciplinary neuroscience research, which is a critical input in discovering new and better treatments for brain diseases.

Suing Upstream or Downstream? A Value Chain Perspective on Defendant Selection in Patent Infringement Suits
Presenter: Adrian Goettfried (TUM)
Discussant: Elisabeth Hofmeister (MPI)

Patent infringement suits may target various parties in the value chain, from the original implementer who translated the patented invention into a technical artifact downward to a commercial user of the final product. We analyze the plaintiff’s selection of “litigation level”, i.e., the level in the value chain on which the defendant is active. We distinguish between “direct litigation”, where the defendant is the original implementer of the patent; and “indirect litigation”, where the defendant is downstream from the original implementer. Drawing on anchoring and transaction cost theory, we hypothesize which factors render bifurcated patent infringement suits more likely. We present empirical findings from a study of 247 patent infringement suits filed at US district courts between 2010 and 2016. 38% of the analyzed patent infringement suits are indirect, with a particularly high prevalence in retail trade (78%) and services (58%; e.g., software or computer services). Indirect suits are relatively rare in manufacturing industries (25%), with electronics being the only exception (51%). In multivariate analysis, we find indirect patent infringement suits to be associated with complex technologies, open standards covered by standard-essential patents, and product patents, supporting three of our hypotheses. We contribute theoretically to research on value capture by suggesting antecedents of direct and indirect patent infringement suits. We discuss policy implications arising from the relative efficiency of the two modes and identify the need for managers to take an end-to-end perspective on IP risks in the value chain.

This paper quantifies the role of family background in who becomes an inventor in India — using the information content in surnames. Indian surnames typically contain information about one’s caste, religion, or geographic origin. Based on records of all adult Indians alive (~850 million individuals), a national survey of 130 million families, and historical registers from the British India civil service and university graduates in the 1850s, we develop a novel dataset to track inequality between family groups over time and space in India. We find that based on family background alone, the bottom two-thirds of India’s population (~1 billion individuals) have a very low chance of becoming an entrepreneur, inventor, scientist, or even participating in national entrance exams for top universities. This pattern is unique to India with no other major country having nearly as much name-based advantage in outcomes. Integrating marginalized communities will not only benefit the excluded communities within India but will also enable India to enhance its aggregate contribution to the global economy and to the knowledge frontier.
(Joint work with Ruchir Agarwal)

Contact person: Albert Roger

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Patent protection was introduced for plant biotechnology in the United States in 1985, and it affected crops differentially depending on their reproductive structures. Exploiting this unique feature of plant physiology and a new dataset of crop-specific technology development, I find that the introduction of patent rights increased the development of novel plant varieties in affected crops. Technology development was driven by a rapid increase in private sector investment, was accompanied by positive spillover effects on innovation in certain non-biological agricultural technologies, and led to an increase in crop yields. Patent rights, however, could come with potentially significant costs to the consumers of technology and distortions to downstream production. Nevertheless, I document that in US counties that were more exposed to the change in patent law because of their crop composition, land values and profits increased. Taken together, the results suggest that the prospect of patent protection spurred technological progress and increased downstream productivity and profits.

Contact person: Albert Roger

Subscription to the invitation mailing list and more information on the seminar page.

Join Sören Auer and Dietmar Harhoff for an in-depth conversation about digitalization and innovation processes in Germany. They will exchange their views on the hurdles and obstacles that lie along the path of developing and adopting innovations, and discuss inspiring examples of successful programs that have played a pivotal role in nurturing digitalization and driving innovation in Germany.

The event will be held online via zoom and is in German.

The Max Planck Digitality Fireside Chat is an informal event format for in-depth talks and discussions on digitality and digital transformation. The aim is to allow for an exchange between researchers and digital pioneers who have come forward with new concepts, proposals and ideas, and are actively shaping digitalization.