Small Worlds in Networks of Inventors and the Role of Science: An Analysis of France.

· Using data on patent applications at European Patent Office, we examine the structural properties of networks of inventors in France in different technologies, and how they depend from the inventive activity of scientists from universities and public research organizations (PROs). We revisit earlier findings on small world properties of social networks of inventors, and propose more rigorous tests of such hypothesis. We find that academic and PRO inventors contribute significantly to patenting in science‐based fields. Such contribution is decisive for the emergence of small world properties.networks, inventors, academic patenting, small world.

Artificial intelligence as a tool for research and development in European patent law

Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is increasingly fundamental for research and development (“R&D”). Thanks to its powerful analytical and generative capabilities, AI is arguably changing how we invent. According to several scholars, this finding calls into question the core principles of European patent law—the field of law devoted to protecting inventions. In particular, the AI revolution might have an impact on the notions of “invention”, “inventor”, “inventive step”, and “skilled person”. The present dissertation examines how AI might affect each of those fundamental concepts. It concludes that European patent law is a flexible legal system capable of adapting to technological change, including the advent of AI. First, this work finds that “invention” is a purely objective notion. Inventions consist of technical subject-matter. Whether artificial intelligence had a role in developing the invention is therefore irrelevant as such. Nevertheless, de lege lata, the inventor is necessarily a natural person. There is no room for attributing inventorship to an AI system. In turn, the notion of “inventor” comprises whoever makes an intellectual contribution to the inventive concept. And patent law has always embraced “serendipitous” inventions—those that one stumbles upon by accident. Therefore, at a minimum, the natural person who recognizes an invention developed through AI would qualify as its inventor. Instead, lacking a human inventor, the right to the patent would not arise at all. Besides, the consensus among scholars is that, de facto, AI cannot invent “autonomously” at the current state of technology. The likelihood of an “invention without an inventor” is thus remote. AI is rather a tool for R&D, albeit a potentially sophisticated one. Coming to the “skilled person”, they are the average expert in the field that can rely on the standard tools for routine research and experimentation. Hence, this work finds that if and when AI becomes a “standard” research tool, it should be framed as part of the skilled person. Since AI is an umbrella term for a myriad of different technologies, the assessment of what is truly “standard” for the skilled person – and what would be considered inventive against that figure – demands a precise case-by-case analysis, which takes into account the different AI techniques that exist, the degree of human involvement and skill for using them, and the crucial relevance of data for many AI tools. However, while AI might cause increased complexities and require adaptations – especially to the inventive step assessment – the fundamental principles of European patent law stand the test of time

Technical Change and Industrial Dynamics as Evolutionary Processes

This work prepared for B. Hall and N. Rosenberg (eds.) Handbook of Innovation, Elsevier (2010), lays out the basic premises of this research and review and integrate much of what has been learned on the processes of technological evolution, their main features and their effects on the evolution of industries. First, we map and integrate the various pieces of evidence concerning the nature and structure of technological knowledge the sources of novel opportunities, the dynamics through which they are tapped and the revealed outcomes in terms of advances in production techniques and product characteristics. Explicit recognition of the evolutionary manners through which technological change proceed has also profound implications for the way economists theorize about and analyze a number of topics central to the discipline. One is the theory of the firm in industries where technological and organizational innovation is important. Indeed a large literature has grown up on this topic, addressing the nature of the technological and organizational capabilities which business firms embody and the ways they evolve over time. Another domain concerns the nature of competition in such industries, wherein innovation and diffusion affect growth and survival probabilities of heterogeneous firms, and, relatedly, the determinants of industrial structure. The processes of knowledge accumulation and diffusion involve winners and losers, changing distributions of competitive abilities across different firms, and, with that, changing industrial structures. Both the sector-specific characteristics of technologies and their degrees of maturity over their life cycles influence the patterns of industrial organization ? including of course size distributions, degrees of concentration, relative importance of incumbents and entrants, etc. This is the second set of topics which we address. Finally, in the conclusions, we briefly flag some fundamental aspects of economic growth and development as an innovation driven evolutionary process.Innovation, Technological paradigms, Technological regimes and trajectories, Evolution, Learning, Capability-based theories of the firm, Selection, Industrial dynamics, Emergent properties, Endogenous growth

Positioning Guglielmo Marconi\u27s wireless : a rhetorical analysis of an early twentieth-century technology.

This dissertation is a rhetorical analysis of Guglielmo Marconi\u27s wireless. Texts surrounding the invention reveal intersections between technology and society and communicate information about the wireless through tropes of progress. The wireless was seen as a monumental early twentieth-century technology that would change the world by extending communication potential. This dissertation demonstrates that the wireless was created rhetorically before it existed as a black-box technology. Marconi\u27s technical texts, popular press articles, and F. T. Marinetti\u27s reinscriptions are discourses where the wireless existed rhetorically. To borrow Charles Bazerman\u27s definition, the rhetoric of technology deals with the ideology surrounding objects of the built environment ; a culture\u27s attitudes and values help shape the technologies produced by a society. Technologies do not become realized without adhering to a society\u27s values, attitudes, and practices. A system of mass communication existed in the early twentieth century (telegraph and telephone wires), but, almost more importantly, the public was conditioned to embrace new technologies for the sake of human advancement. Texts surrounding the wireless\u27s creation show that certain conditions of modernity—speed, efficiency, evolution, and ahistoricity—appear as tropes of progress in wireless rhetoric. The non-mechanical factors that create or allow a technology to become realized are found in (re)presentations that show the wireless as a product in according with prevailing cultural values. This dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter I reviews literature on Science, Technology, and Society studies that offers a theoretical framework for analyzing the wireless as a product of modernity. Chapter II examines three important presentations (reprinted in technical journals) Marconi gave to the technical community that demonstrate four topoi in Marconi\u27s rhetoric of the wireless—cultural pride associated with advancement/evolution, expectations and current successes, economic viability, and patents showing Marconi\u27s ownership. Chapter III analyzes the rhetoric used by pro-Marconi journalists in American periodicals that construct the wireless in the popular press. Chapter IV explains how progress was embedded into Western industrial cultures. Specifically, the chapter demonstrates how the wireless and other technologies fit F.T. Marinetti\u27s love of progressive technologies, which was an exaggeration of industrial cultures\u27 fascination with new advancements

Grazing the digital commons : artist-made softwares, politicised technologies and the creation of new generative realms

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.The growth of the free software movement from the mid-1980s to the present day has contributed vast amounts of creative labour and technical innovation to what has become known as the digital commons. In many instances it has been 'the greater good' rather than commercial gain which has driven this research and production. Artists have played a significant role in the research, development, creative application and socialisation of various technologies, yet their recent contributions to cultural software have not been widely documented and critically examined outside of the media arts field. This thesis focuses on the recent work of the leading art group Mongrel, and their development of a powerful software platform called Netmonster. By drawing on current theoretical ideas from sociology including the qualities of immaterial labour in advanced capitalism, and the social and power dynamics of network society, I have built a framework to consider the social role and potential of cultural software. My research begins by outlining early developments in the history of computing, emphasising social and political factors shaping the technologies, and the ideas and goals of their inventors. This is followed by a discussion of the creative power of the digital commons, the collaborative labour processes involved in the free software movement, examples of innovative social technologies which are being produced, and the kinds of opportunities which can be opened up through the adoption of these tools and processes. The research concludes with an in-depth study of the Netmonster software. Netmonster is a ’poetic structure for producing network visualisations'. I draw upon my own participant-observer experiences of using Netmonster as a research and art-making tool in 2005 to explain and illustrate its features. According to Mongrel, Netmonster was created for 'the online resourcing and collaborative construction of the networked image’. A responsive, immediate and sensuous space for projects based on networked collaboration — the future of generative social software'. My research concludes that the digital commons is a thriving site of creative and affective production which flows through and animates the networks of 'informational capitalism'. Although the digital commons is increasingly a site of contestation as attempts are made by various forces to restrict, commodify or enclose it, it continues to grow and diversify, adding new nodes of generative activity to itself, and in the process transforming the nature of network society itself

Crown jewel computers : On the Schickard-Pascal “Prioritätsstreit”.

Early history of computing and national interests – An essay. (Including translations of Rene Taton’s work.

The Spanish motor industry in the first third of the 20th Century: A lost opportunity

The Spanish automobile industry had a late start. Although the country proved capable of short production runs of high- quality vehicles during the first third of the century it never managed to build up its own industry, unlike Great Britain, France, or Italy. What then, were the critical shortcomings that prevented the establishment of large Spanish motor manufacturers? Put another way, why did all of the companies set up during the first half-century fail to survive? This paper attempts to shed some light on these questions, employing a wide-ranging analysis of both internal and external factors affecting the industry. A feeble internal market, lack of resources and production factors are usually adduced as reasons, as are Spain's general economic backwardness and the role played by the public authorities. However, this paper mainly focuses on the internal factors concerning company strategy and organisation. A comparison with the Italian case helps put the traditional arguments in proper perspective and highlights those covering business strategies. Finally, we argue that a broad range of factors needs to be analysed to fully understand why Spain failed to establish a motor industry.Automobile industry, firm organization and behavior, government policy, Spain

The Global Artificial Intelligence Revolution Challenges Patent Eligibility Laws

This Article examines patent eligibility jurisprudence of artificial intelligence in the United States, Europe, France, Japan, and Singapore. It identifies de facto requirements of patent-eligible artificial intelligence. It also examines the adaptability of patent eligibility jurisprudence to adapt with the growth of artificial intelligence

"Audacity or Precision": The Paradoxes of Henri Villat's Fluid Mechanics in Interwar France

In Interwar France, Henri Villat became the true leader of theoretical researches on fluid mechanics. Most of his original work was done before the First World War; it was highly theoretical and its applicability was questioned. After having organized the first post-WWI International Congress of Mathematicians in 1920, Villat became the editor of the famous Journal de math\'ematiques pure et appliqu\'es and the director of the influential book series "M\'emorial des sciences math\'ematiques." From 1929 on, he held the fluid mechanics chair established by the Air Ministry at the Sorbonne in Paris and was heading the government's critical effort invested in fluid mechanics. However, while both his wake theory and his turbulence theory seemingly had little success outside France or in the aeronautical industry (except in the eyes of his students), applied mathematics was despised by the loud generation of Bourbaki mathematicians coming of age in the mid 1930s. How are we to understand the contrasted assessments one can make of Villat's place in the history of fluid mechanics