Events

The Munich Summer Institute (MSI) is hosted by the Center for Law & Economics at ETH Zurich, HEC Lausanne, Northeastern University, the Chair for Technology and Innovation Management at TUM, the Chair for Economics of Innovation at TUM, the Institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization (ISTO) at the LMU Munich and the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition.

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Further information on the website of the MSI

Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Marstallplatz 1, Munich, room E10

On 5 May 2023, the Institute hosted the 9th Max.P Salon. Robert Schlögl, President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, spoke to members of the Max Planck Foundation about the chances and challenges of regenerative energies, making an impassioned plea for rapid, large-scale action to reduce CO2 emissions.

On green electrons and green molecules

How can we successfully shape the transition from fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas, to renewable energies such as solar energy, wind energy, and hydrogen?

The triumph of renewable energies seems unstoppable. The generation of electricity by solar energy, wind energy and hydropower has great potential, but the energy yield fluctuates and storage technologies have only limited capacities. Even if we have 100% green power, we still rely on material energy sources for about 80% of our needs. What is therefore necessary, is a second mainstay for the energy system of the future in the form of a C02-neutral molecular energy carrier - for which only hydrogen comes into question. Prof. Schlögl spoke at the 9th MAX.P Salon to supporters of the Max Planck Society on how the appropriate technologies can be developed and the necessary hydrogen partnerships forged, and whether hydrogen can then be exclusively green or also blue or turquoise.

The chemist Robert Schlögl has been the new President of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation since 1 January 2023, and is Director Emeritus at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society, Berlin, and at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion in Mülheim an der Ruhr. He is an internationally renowned and excellently networked scientist with a research focus on energy conversion processes and has been honored with numerous awards, including the Eni Award in Energy Transition, which is referred to as the “Nobel Prize for Energy”.

He emphasized that no single country can solve the global challenge: Self-sufficiency is a dangerous delusion, so is sufficiency. Global technologies and markets are the only viable way – realized with large amounts of stored energy: hydrogen is vast. The new steady state of the planet is terra incognita. Therefore, we must reduce CO2 emissions as quickly as possible on a large scale, not with small and difficult measures.

The Max.P Salon is a Salon of Science founded in 2020 by members of the Board of Trustees of the Max Planck Foundation. The Max Planck Foundation, established in 2006, is a private and non-profit funding association that exclusively supports the Max Planck Society and its institutes, and makes its funds available for excellent, innovative and pioneering projects and research endeavors. It is one of the largest science-funding foundations in Germany.

Video (in German) with photo impressions from the event on Youtube

Women continue to be underrepresented in the field of economics, especially among permanent faculty. Using 40 years of Danish administrative data combined with bibliometric data on publications from the Scopus database, we study the impact of children on women’s probability of successful academic careers. Our event study estimates show that parenthood reduces women’s likelihood of staying in academia by 10 percent relative to men, and the gap appears to be permanent. We further document a gender gap in the likelihood of getting tenure in the three years following parenthood, conditional on staying in academia, while the gender gap in publications is insignificant.

Contact person: Marina Chugunova

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

Joint Conference of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition with the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo (FDUSP)

Time information: Local time São Paulo (GMT-3)

Live broadcast on YouTube

Conference program as pdf

This paper analyzes the unexpected success of AlphaFold V1, an AI-based software program representing a publicly available and novel methodological advance within the “protein folding” (PF) subfield of computational biology. As a novel tool that represented a significant advance, AlphaFold V1 influenced the size and the expertise composition of academic research labs already producing similar software in the PF subfield. Specifically, AlphaFold V1 caused the principal investigators of established labs to reconsider the size, and the depth and breadth of expertise necessary to capitalize on the advance; and even to decide whether their labs should continue work in the PF subfield altogether. Results show that impacted labs adapted to the new methodological advance by becoming larger and broader in expertise. This study contributes findings on: (i) the mechanisms of new opportunity and increased competition that shape lab composition; (ii) the complexity of science at the frontier of human expertise and artificial intelligence; and (iii) the role of companies in the collective effort to produce scientific knowledge. The results carry implications for further research on the integration of disciplinary insights, the scaled computational capabilities enabled by artificial intelligence, and the organization of science itself.

Ansprechpartner: Michael E. Rose

The Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition and the Technical University of Munich organise the annual workshop “The Organisation, Economics and Policy of Scientific Research”.

Participation in the event is open and free of charge: Please send an email to michael.rose(at)ip.mpg.de.

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More information on the workshop webpage

Firms apply for patents for a variety of reasons. In addition to trying to prevent others from copying a commercialized patented invention, firms also patent one technology to support the commercialization of their other innovations (which we call “pre-emptive patents”). At the same time, many patent applications fail to yield commercialized products. A variety of policy debates revolve around the relative rates of these different uses of patents.  In particular, there is a concern that a large number of patents are not commercialized (with a common folk statistic stating that 10% or fewer are commercialized), raising concerns of over-patenting, with possible adverse effects on the innovation system. However, it has been difficult to get systematic evidence on the relative incidences of commercialized versus pre-emptive or failed patents. This paper applies advanced natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) methods to US patent documents to estimate the rates of patent uses of various types, over time at scale. We first use a survey of US inventors on the commercialization and other outcomes of their patents as independently labeled data for training our ML models. Using a combination of context embedding codings of the patent text (based on BERT) and bibliometric indicators from the patent documents, we develop a random forest model predicting different outcomes for patented inventions. We find that adding BERT coding of patents’ text contents offers new information beyond commonly used numeric and categorical variables reflecting patent characteristics (technology class, number of claims, patent class span, etc.) or token-based text analytics indicators, highlighting the benefits of adding context embedding NLP when categorizing patents. We check the validity of the trained model using external data on Virtual Patent Marking, and show that our model predicts high commercialization rates among patents that are indeed associated with commercialized products. We apply this trained model to the universe of all granted US patents, 1981-2015 to estimate the probabilities of various uses of the patents in this population. These estimates of usage probabilities are publicly available for other researchers to use in follow-on studies. Among US granted patents 1981-2015, the mean probability of commercialization is .59, and the mean probability of pre-emptive use is .19. Finally, we show how these probabilities vary by year, patent class, firm size, and government interest. The paper makes several contributions to understanding the uses of patents, as well as how to use ML to analyze patent data. In particular, we show that estimated rates of commercialized patents are substantially higher than is often asserted in policy discussion.

Contact person: Elisabeth Hofmeister

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

In this talk, Ali Aslan Gümüsay intends to bring together multiple projects around innovative templates, circular forms of organizing, and futures. As new forms of organizing enter a field, they may need to co-create innovative templates to tackle institutional tensions. Equally, they may question and innovate organizational purpose, processes and practices. Given planetary boundaries and infringement on academic jurisdictions, there is a need to not only study these forms of organizing, but also reflect upon the role of scholarship to possibly co-create desirable futures. This includes to think about how to theorize data before it exists – moving from post-factual to pre-factual – and how to (re)organize scholarship itself.

Contact person: Anna-Sophie Liebender-Luc

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

Panel 1: The Ukrainian Pharmaceutical Industry: Strategic and Industrial Policy Perspectives
Moderation: Prof. Dietmar Harhoff, Ph.D.

Volodymyr Bortnytskyi, Ph.D., Deputy Head of the Social and Humanitarian Security of the Staff of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, online

Prof. Dr. Liudmyla Petrenko, Department of Business Economics and Entrepreneurship, Kyiv National Economic University named after Vadym Hetman, Ukraine, in person

Panel 2: Drug Research and Development in Ukraine
Moderation: Anastasiia Lutsenko

Prof. Ivan Vyshnyvetskyy, MD, Ph.D., Managing Director Ukraine at FutureMeds, President of the Ukrainian Association for Clinical Research, Associate Professor at National Medical University (Kyiv), online

Prof. Nino Patsuria, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, online

Panel 3: A Regulatory Framework Outlook for the Ukrainian Pharmaceutical Sector
Moderation: Dr. Daria Kim

Prof. Vitalii Pashkov, Head of the Laboratory for the Study of National Security Problems in the Field of Public Health of the Аcademician Stashis Scientific Research Institute for the Study of Crime Problems, National Academy of Law Sciences of Ukraine, in person

Nataliya Gutorova, Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University, Ukraine, in person

Panel 4: Perspectives on Intellectual Property in the Pharmaceutical Industry in Ukraine
Moderation: Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Reto M. Hilty

As. Prof. Oksana Kashyntseva, Ph.D. Law, Head of the Department of IP rights and Human Rights in Healthcare of the SR Institute of Intellectual Property of National Academy of Law Sciences of Ukraine, Head of the NGO ‘Center of Harmonization of Human Rights’, in person

Sergiy Kondratyuk, ITPC Global IP and Access to Medicines Projects Manager, online

Dr. Yevgeniya Piddubna, Corporate Affairs Director, Farmak JSC, Chair of the Healthcare Committee at the Union of Ukrainian Entrepreneurs, in person

Dr. Kseniia Velychko, GR Manager, Pharmaceutical Company ‘Darnitsa’, in person

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