An emerging paradigm or just another trajectory? Understanding the nature of technological changes using engineering heuristics in the telecommunications switching industry

The theoretical literature on technological changes distinguishes between paradigmatic changes and changes in trajectories. Recently several scholars have performed empirical studies on the way technological trajectories evolve in specific industries, often by predominantly looking at the artifacts. Much less - if any - empirical work has been done on paradigmatic changes, even though these have a much more profound impact on today's industry. It follows from the theory that such studies would need to focus more on the knowledge level than on the artifact level, raising questions on how to operationalize such phenomena. This study aims to fill this gap by applying network-based methodologies to knowledge networks, represented here by patents and patent citations. The rich technological history of telecommunications switches shows how engineers in the post-war period were confronted with huge challenges to meet drastically changing demands. This historical background is a starting point for an in-depth analysis of patents, in search of information about technological direction, technical bottlenecks, and engineering heuristics. We aim to identify when such changes took place over the seven different generations of technological advances this industry has seen. In this way we can easily recognize genuine paradigmatic changes compared to more regular changes in trajectory.technological trajectories; patents; network analysis; telecommunication manufacturing industry

The interplay between standardization and technological change: A study on wireless technologies, technological trajectories, and essential patent claims

In many technology fields, standardization is the primary method of achieving alignment between actors. Especially if strong network effects and increasing returns are present, the market often ends up with a single standard that dominates the technical direction, activities and search heuristics, for at least one full technology generation. Although literature has addressed such decision processes quite extensively, relatively little attention has been paid to the way in which standards affect - and are affected by - technological change. Building upon the concepts of technological regimes and trajectories (Dosi, 1982), and on the methodology proposed by (Hummon & Doreian, 1989) to empirically investigate such trajectories, this papers aims to study the interplay between standardisation and technological change. We conclude that the empirically derived technological trajectories very well match the standardisation activities and the main technological challenges derived from the engineering literature. Moreover, we also observe that the Hummon & Doreian methodology can indeed reveal technological discontinuities. To the best of our knowledge, this has not been the case in earlier studies using this technology, and refutes concerns that this methodology has a (too) strong bias towards incremental, continuous technological paths. Finally, we compare the set of patents in the most important technological trajectories to the set of so-called essential patent claims at standards bodies, and conclude that there is no significant relationship. This confirms earlier arguments that essential patents are not necessarily ‘important’ patents in a technical sense.technological trajectories, standardization, innovation

When authors become inventors: an empirical analysis on patent-paper pairs in medical research

This paper investigates the effect of patenting on follow-on knowledge in cancer research. Using a difference-in-difference approach on an original dataset of patent-paper-pairs we are able to estimate the causal effect of the granting of a patent on scientic development in the same domain. Furthermore, we disentangle between private companies and universities in order to assess whether patenting impacts differently on the two groups. In addition, we study to which extend the degree of applicability of an innovation is further affects the relation. To address these issues we build a novel dataset matching patent data (retrieved from USPTO) and publication data (retrieved from Thompson-Web of Science). Results show that patenting reduces the rate of citations of the paired publication indicating a decrease of related scientic activity only in case the citing agent belongs to a public institution. In addition, the the more invention is applied, the weaker is the negative effect. This paper makes a contribution to the debate on IPR and economics of science

The Effect of Lobbies’ Narratives on Academics’ Perceptions of Scientific Publishing: An Information Provision Experiment

This paper presents experimental evidence on the impact of opposite copyright lobbies’ narratives on scholars’ views toward the publishing system. We conduct the empirical analysis by running a large-scale information provision experiment on a representative population of European scholars. Scholars were individually randomized into a control group or one of two promotional videos presenting opposite lobbying interests. The first video presents the publisher’s narrative, featuring publishers as innovative firms and the guardians of ethics and scientific advance. While the second presents copyright activists’ narrative featuring publishers as greedy and unethical. We document scholars’ general discontent towards the publishing system. However, both lobbyist narratives change perceptions towards their cause. Overall, publishers’ lobbyist information has a slightly smaller persuasive effect, linked to a small part of the population that exhibits a strong emotional reaction. Additional information is accompanied by a slight increase in the probability of taking the action of being informed, especially when we control for the scholar’s quality