Views on challenges involving patents in standards

Sheet presentati

The development of European mobile telecommunications standards : an assessment of the success of GSM, TETRA, ERMES and UMTS

Nowadays, flexible electronic cooperation paradigms are required for core business processes to meet the speed and flexibility requirements dictated by fast-changing markets. These paradigms should include the functionality to establish the formal business relationship required by the importance of these core processes. The business relationship should be established in an automated, electronic way in order to match the speed and flexibility requirements mentioned above. As such, it should considerably improve on the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of traditional contracting in this context. The result of the establishment should be a detailed electronic contract that contains a complete specification of the intended cooperation between organizations. Electronic contracts should contain a precise and unambiguous specification of the collaboration at both the conceptual and technological level. Existing commercial software solutions for business-to-business contracting provide low level of automation and concentrate solely on the automated management of the contract enactment. However, in the modern, dynamic, business settings, an econtracting system has to support high automation of the e-contract establishment, enactment, and management. In the thesis, the business, legal, and technological requirements for the development of a highly automated e-contracting system are investigated. Models that satisfy these requirements and that can be used as a foundation for the implementation of an electronic contracting system are defined. First, the thesis presents the business benefits introduced to companies by highly automated electronic contracting. Next, a data and process analysis of electronic contracting is presented. The specification of electronic contracts and the required process support for electronic contract establishment and enactment are investigated. The business benefits and data and process models defined in the thesis are validated on the basis of two business cases from on-line advertising, namely the cases of online advertising in "De Telegraaf" and "Google". Finally, the thesis presents a specification of the functionalities that must be provided by an e-contracting system. A conceptual reference architecture that can be used as a starting point in the design and implementation of an electronic contracting system is defined. The work in the thesis is conducted on the intersection of the scientific areas of conceptual information and process modeling and specification on the one hand and distributed information system architecture modeling on the other hand

Role of standards in a digital economy

No abstract

The effect of strategic patenting on cumulative innovation in UMTS standardization

Since the 1990s, intellectual property rights have become increasingly important in the telecommunications sector. In particular, the strategic role of patents played in the GSM standard irrevocably changed the IPR strategies within the sector, increasing both the revenues and barriers provided by telecom patents. The issues raised by GSM foreshadowed comparable impacts of patents upon other ICT standards. These developments parallels broader concerns raised by researchers about the risk that such patents impede the process of cumulative innovation, a problem some have labeled "the tragedy of the anticommons." After reviewing research on the various controversies regarding patents, cumulative innovation and standardization, we review the evolution of the role of patents in telecommunications standards. We then analyze the role of 1227 unique "essential" patents declared in the standardization of Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), the thirdgeneration successor to GSM. Using a combination of data sources, we show how differences in the timing, nature and scope of patenting activities relate to firms’ business models, competitive position and role in the standardization activity. From this, we offer broader observations about the limits of existing IPR policies and coordination mechanisms, as well as the likely impact of various policy alternatives on patent proliferation in telecommunications standardization

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

The performance of university-industry collaborations : empirical evidence from the Netherlands

no abstrac

Intellectual property rights, strategic technology agreements and market structure : the case of the GSM

This paper investigates the role of intellectual property rights (IPRs) in shaping the GSM industry. This industry is an example of a high-tech industry in which standards play a large role. In the process of designing the GSM standard, a lot of attention has been given to IPRs, mainly to avoid a situation in which a single IPR holder could hamper or even totally block the development of the standard. Nevertheless, the ultimate GSM standard contains a large amount of so-called ‘essential IPRs’, i.e., IPRs without which the implementation of GSM products is impossible. The paper starts with a general discussion of the development of GSM, and the role of firm strategy and IPRs in this process. Next, we present a database on the essential IPRs in the GSM standard. This database has been compiled on the basis of international patent statistics, and the data that manufacturers have supplied to ETSI, the European standardization body responsible for defining the GSM standard. We use this database to assess the dynamic IPR position of firms in the original GSM standard and its subsequent development. In a next part of our analysis, we relate the firm’s IPR position to the trends in strategic technology agreements in the mobile telecommunications field. We ask the question whether firms that are powerful in terms of IPRs are also the firms that are ‘central’ in the technology agreements network (or vice versa). We also investigate whether developments over time in the technology agreements data follow from the dynamic movements in the IPR position of a firm, and which other factors play a role in this

Governance and success of university-industry collaborations on the basis of Ph.D. projects : an explorative study

Faced with ever-increasing pressure to innovate and perform, firms consider universities as a significant, external source of knowledge. There is a variety of ways through which such knowledge flow can take place, including academic publications, contract research, staff mobility and university patents and licenses, but also more collaborative modes such as joint research projects. This paper focuses on a specific – and promising – collaborative model, in which firms and universities are together involved in a Ph.D. project, carried out by a doctoral candidate. We model the relationship on the one hand on various aspects of governance, and the success of the collaboration on the other. Here, success is operationalized in a number of different ways, including the successful transfer, the application and the commercialization of knowledge. Our model was tested using a survey conducted at the Eindhoven University of Technology. We conclude that governance decisions have a significant impact on the ultimate success. Among other things, the choice of university supervisor plays a pivotal role. Moreover, success is more likely if there is joint decision-making by both university and partner on the content of the project, and communication between the Ph.D. candidate and their supervisor in the firm has a high frequency and quality. We believe our findings can help universities and firms to collaborate successfully