Events

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) I is a technology that can create novel, original and inventive content based on users input or data. AI has become a powerful and disruptive force in various domains, especially in the pharma-biotech industry, where it can accelerate drug discovery, optimize clinical trials, and improve patient outcomes. However, the use of AI also raises complex and unresolved issues regarding patent inventorship and ownership. While some jurisdictions have explicitly excluded AI from being an inventor, there is still uncertainty on how humans can claim inventorship on the inventive contributions of AI. This presentation will explore the question of inventive contribution in an invention and its impact on inventorship from a pharma-biotech perspective. The talk further discusses how different jurisdiction’s patent law define an ‘invention’ and an ‘inventor’, and how this can address the challenges posed by AI-assisted inventions. This talk will also explore the case of the Artificial Inventor Project, and how different courts have rejected the argument of AI inventor. Finally, this talk will propose recommendations for a future framework model that addresses some of the patent inventorship and ownership issues posed by AI in the age of generative innovation.

About Pratap Devarapalli

Dr. Pratap Devarapalli MSc, LLM, PhD is an Intellectual Property Strategist and Patent researcher. He has expertise in dealing with Intellectual Property issues in relation to emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, 3D bioprinting and synthetic biology. He is currently a Postdoctoral fellow at TC Bernie School of Law, University of Queensland, Australia. Pratap pursued his doctoral studies from the Centre for Law and Genetics, University of Tasmania, Australia where his research was focused on “Patenting issues related to Bioprinted tissues and Bioinks”. He was invited by Government of Japan to assist Japanese Patent Office in harmonizing of Japanese Patent Law in relation AI. He pursued his Master of Law (LLM) in Intellectual Property from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Geneva and the Queensland University of Technology, Australia. He is the recipient of the prestigious International Fellowship offered by WIPO. He holds a Master's degree in Genomics and a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology, Microbiology, and Chemistry. Pratap also holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Patent informatics from the Academy of Scientific and Innovative Research at the CSIR Unit of Research and Development of Information Products, India and worked as a Patent researcher in the same.

Multinational companies are affected by tax reforms both at home and abroad. We study the effect of foreign corporate tax reforms on domestic employment and wages. To do this, we link the universe of Norwegian firm-level foreign direct investment (FDI) data with the universe of Norwegian individual tax returns. Exploiting the staggered implementation of tax reforms in foreign countries which affect the subsidiaries of Norwegian firms, we find that domestically-owned Norwegian firms see domestic salaries increase by 2.4% following foreign tax cuts. We conclude that if all foreign profits are repatriated, approximately 18% of the foreign tax burden is borne by workers.

Contact person: David Heller

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Mobility of scientists has been increasingly recognized as a strategy to favor recombination of ideas and innovative research. However, our knowledge of patterns of migration of scientists, as well as their determinants, remains limited. We measure migration of scholars based on information on changes in their institutional affiliations over time, using metadata on over 36 million journal articles and reviews indexed by Scopus. Specifically, we produce a database of annual international migration flows of scholars, for all countries, from 1998-2017 (the “Scholarly Migration Database”). We use the newly generated database to provide evidence on the relationship between economic development and the emigration propensity of scholars, and to assess patterns and trends of gender inequalities in international mobility. Initial key results and potential further developments for this project will be presented.

Contact person: Michael E. Rose

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Reported numbers of observed scientific misconduct, e.g. through retracted articles, are increasing at an alarming rate. The detected cases, however, only present the tip of the iceberg because the actual amount of scientific misconduct is impossible to observe. Fraud in science is professionally and socially unaccepted and leads to sanctions for the culpable scientists so that misconducting scientists try to hide their fraudulent actions. This means that ultimately, the size of the population of misconducting authors remains elusive and, as such, presents a “dark number.”
We estimate the size of the population of misconducting authors in medical and health sciences, drawing on capture-recapture methods. We find that the population size of misconducting authors in medical and health sciences is about 4,000 and therewith much larger than the cases that are detected. This finding calls for more transparency through data sharing among peers and author responsibility assignment. (joint with Maikel Pellens)

Contact person: Rainer Widmann

We investigate the impact of misconduct on the financing and exit opportunities of entrepreneurial ventures that are technologically related to the misconduct perpetrators. To do so, we consider all reported misconduct cases affecting US startups during 1998-2020 and estimate differences-in-differences models saturated with fixed effects. We show that startups producing similar technologies as the misconduct perpetrators become less likely to obtain financing and raise smaller amounts after the misconduct event is reported in the news, relative to startups developing dissimilar technologies located outside the perpetrators state. The strongest negative effects of misconduct are found to be associated with technological misconduct and sexual harassment, followed by financial fraud, while misconducts related to intellectual property infringements have statistically insignificant impact. Startups related to misconduct perpetrators are no less likely to be acquired than unrelated startups.

Contact person: Daehyun Kim

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Startup Role in Post-war Rebuilding of the Ukrainian Economy (Iuliia Gernego, Kyiv National Economic University)
Innovative Entrepreneurship in Turbulent Times of War in Ukraine (Tetiana Shkoda, Kyiv National Economic University)

This paper shows that gender inequality affects the extent to which scientific ideas are used to develop new technologies. Despite strong incentives to select the most promising ideas, we claim that inventors are more likely to build on men’s rather than women’s science. We exploit the occurrence of simultaneous discoveries – i.e., instances when a man and a woman publish the same idea around the same time – and track the citations that those papers receive in patented inventions. The papers led by female scientists receive on average 40% fewer patent citations than their male-led twin. We examine several explanations for this gender gap in inventors’ attention. The pattern of results is consistent with inventors’ value expectations being a driver of the attention gap, beyond differences in the salience, overall productivity, and academic impact of scientists’ research. These findings have implications for our understanding of frictions in science-based technology development, as well as for broader theories of how gender inequality shapes cumulative innovation.

Contact person: Michael Rose

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The Unified Patent Court (UPC) is now a reality in Europe. The new system for patent dispute resolution is the most significant change in the European patent landscape in decades. The court has been open since 1 June this year and is starting to hand down its first decisions. The UPC has a local division in Helsinki and a Nordic-Baltic regional division with its seat in Stockholm. Vilhelm Schröder is an experienced patent litigator from Finland and will provide insight on how the UPC is perceived particularly from a Nordic perspective.
 

This study examines when and how engineers who connect to brokers who span structural holes in communication networks can improve innovative performance at their firm. Using survey data on social networks at a large B2B software company, we find that engineers who pay attention to information from brokers achieve higher innovative performance than those who pay little (or no) attention to such information. Moreover, we find that the advantage of paying attention to brokers’ information is magnified when focal engineers are embedded in highly constrained networks. Yet, our post-hoc analysis reveals that engineers normally allocate less attention to information from brokers than that from local colleagues partially because brokers’ information is perceived to be less relevant to the engineers. These findings about the crucial role of attention allocation for secondhand brokers make contributions to studies of social networks and innovation.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova