Events

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

This talk will review the speaker’s and other researchers’ efforts to quantify technological change. Some challenges have been at least partially met but others are still outstanding. The important issues include what to measure (the dependent variable) and a variety of economic and technical measures will be considered with the conclusion that functional performance metrics are the most informative about what we want to learn. To quantify change, we also need to decide what the performance metrics theoretically depend upon (the independent variable). One obvious candidate is time but given work by Wright and many others, the presentation will also consider whether an effort variable such as cumulative demand/production or R&D spending improves the understanding of technological change. After making contestable decisions on the variables, the result for a wide variety of technological domains appears to be a generalization of Moore’s Law. However, this exponential relationship with time is quite noisy but more importantly, many (probably most) researchers of technological change do not find the generalized Moore’s Law (GML) acceptable. The final part of the presentation will be discussion and speculation about various reasons for this reality including practical utility, quantitative theoretical foundations and deep qualitative reasoning.

 
Contact Person: Dr. Marco Kleine

Moderation: Luc Desaunettes

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

This talk will review the speaker’s and other researchers’ efforts to quantify technological change. Some challenges have been at least partially met but others are still outstanding. The important issues include what to measure (the dependent variable) and a variety of economic and technical measures will be considered with the conclusion that functional performance metrics are the most informative about what we want to learn. To quantify change, we also need to decide what the performance metrics theoretically depend upon (the independent variable). One obvious candidate is time but given work by Wright and many others, the presentation will also consider whether an effort variable such as cumulative demand/production or R&D spending improves the understanding of technological change. After making contestable decisions on the variables, the result for a wide variety of technological domains appears to be a generalization of Moore’s Law. However, this exponential relationship with time is quite noisy but more importantly, many (probably most) researchers of technological change do not find the generalized Moore’s Law (GML) acceptable. The final part of the presentation will be discussion and speculation about various reasons for this reality including practical utility, quantitative theoretical foundations and deep qualitative reasoning.

 
Contact Person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Room E10

In cooperation with Münchner Kartellrechtsforum e.V. (www.kartellrechtsforum.de)

Vorab findet eine „Aktuelle Viertelstunde“ statt: 
Dr. Bettina Leupold (Legal Counsel bei der BSH Hausgeräte GmbH) spricht zu „Coty und aktuelle kartellrechtliche Entwicklungen im Online-Handel“.

Wie gewohnt lädt das Kartellrechtsforum anschließend zum informellen Austausch bei Getränken und Häppchen ein.

Zur besseren Planung bitten wir um Anmeldung bis zum 23.04.2018 bei delia.zirilli(at)ip.mpg.de. 

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, R00m E10

Commented by Dr. Martin Jäger, Judge at BPatG

Under Art. 3(a) of Regulations 469/2009 and 1610/96, a supplementary protection certificate may be granted for a product only when the latter is protected by the basic patent. Despite the seemingly simple wording, the provision is not uncontroversial. The CJEU has dealt with it in various reasoned orders and judgments, and three referrals are currently pending that essentially ask the same question that was posed in Eli Lilly and Medeva: What are the criteria for deciding whether a product is protected by the basic patent? The CJEU’s case law is relatively clear in ruling out that Art. 3(a) is just a reference to the law applicable to the basic patent. However, it is less clear in defining the meaning of the qualification that the product must be “specified” or “identified” in the claims in order for it to be protected by the basic patent within the meaning of Art. 3(a), and in specifying the function served by this requirement. These and other related topics will be the subject of the presentation of Sir Richard Arnold, on which Dr. Martin Jäger will comment. The speakers are involved in the cases that lead to the referrals. 

Sir Richard David Arnold (University of Westminster and University of Oxford) has been a judge at the High Court of Justice, Chancery Division (2008), since 2013. He has decided some of the most relevant patent and SPC cases in the UK in the last fifteen years. An External Member of the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO since 2016, he is also a prolific contributor to legal journals and books. He is the author of Performers’ Rights (5th ed, Sweet & Maxwell, 2015).

Dr. Martin Jäger has been a judge at the German Federal Patent Court (3rd, 14th and 35th Senate) since 2012. Before that, he was patent examiner at the DPMA, where he led the SPC Project Group from 2000 to 2012.

To facilitate our preparations we ask for registration until Tuesday, April 17, 2018 via email to elisabeth.amler(at)ip.mpg.de.

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 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.

 
Contact Person: Felix Poege

Moderation: Dennis Kann

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 313

 
Contact Person: Zhaoxin Pu

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, Room 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.

Contact Person: Dr. Fabian Gaessler