Sleeping patents: any reason to wake up?

Patents are typically characterized as very valuable assets for firms. Nevertheless, there are many patents in a firm's portfolio that are actually never used. In this paper, we claim that there is a relationship between a firm's decision to use or not to use a patent and the characteristics of the underlying invention. We characterize patent use according to the sleeping or non-sleeping character of the patents in the firm's portfolio. We characterize the underlying invention along different dimensions captured by the patent, i.e. importance, strategic fit, scope and innovativeness. We perform an empirical analysis on a set of patent-active firms in the chemicals industry that trade some of their patents through what is currently the only website specialized in firm technology transfer through the Internet, yet2.com. We use The NBER Patent Citations Data File to obtain information about the patents granted to these firms. Our results suggest that sleeping patents are more innovative, broader and no less important than their counterparts. We conclude that such patents are worth waking up, especially when the underlying invention is applicable to business areas far away from the patentholder's strategic core. These results suggest that there is potential for markets for technology to develop.Patents; innovativeness;

An Analysis of Pure-Revenue Technology Licensing

This paper analyzes the incentives of patent holders to license their technologies for pure-revenue reasons. We hypothesize that this decision is mainly driven by characteristics of the innovation, which determine its technological attractiveness, the relevance of transaction costs in its transfer and the importance of the competition effect. By using the NBER Patent Citations Database and an original dataset of patented technologies devoted to license in an Internet marketplace, we find that importance, innovativeness, fit into the firm's core and scope of the innovation affect the patent holder's willingness to license it. Results increase our awareness on the drivers of technology licensing decisions.Publicad

The renaissance of the "renaissance man"? : specialists vs. generalists in teams of inventors

Is there a role for the multifaceted Renaissance Man in modern team-intensive innovation activities? This paper argues that researchers with broad knowledge, also known as generalists, make an especially valuable contribution to innovation teams. Given the re-combinative nature of technological progress, innovation results depend crucially on the skilful matching of different pieces of knowledge. The presence of generalists in innovation teams makes the knowledge recombination process more effective, even if this comes at the cost of reduced knowledge depth. Moreover, typical barriers in team processes become less acute with the presence of generalists. We analyze the role of generalists versus specialists in innovation teams by tracking the trajectories of inventors in the electrical and electronics industry through their patenting activity. Our findings suggest that innovation teams with the contribution of generalists outperform those that rely on a diverse set of specialistsFinancial support under Grants ECO2009-08278 and ECO2009-08308 of the Spanish Government is gratefully acknowledge

The strategic allocation of inventors to R&D collaborations

Safeguarding against unintended leakage of valuable knowledge in R&D collaboration requires careful attention to the role of inventors participating in these collaborations. In this paper, we claim that the degree of protection of the knowledge embodied by inventors affects how an opportunistic partner can use this information when technology leakage occurs. The implication is that those inventors whose set of knowledge is more protected are more likely to be assigned to joint activities than their co-workers. By relying on patent ownership and authorship data, we analyze the allocation of inventors to collaborative projects from a sample of large pharmaceutical firms. Our results confirm that inventors are strategically allocated to projects according to their degree of preemptive power.Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competition through project no ECO2012-33427 is gratefully acknowledge

The effect of patent protection on inventor mobility

This article investigates the effect of patent protection on the mobility of earlycareer employee-inventors. Using data on patent applications filed at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office between 2001 and 2012 and examiner leniency as a source of exogenous variation in patent protection, we find that one additional patent granted decreases the likelihood of changing employers, on average, by 23%. This decrease is stronger when the employee has fewer coinventors, works outside the core of the firm, and produces more basic-research innovations. These findings are consistent with the idea that patents turn innovation-related skills into patent-holder-specific human capital.This work was supported by the Community of Madrid [Project S2015/HUM-3353], the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities [Projects ECO2015-65599-P, ECO2015-69615-R, PGC2018-094418-B-I00, PGC2018-096316-B-I00, and PGC2018-098767-B-C21], and the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) [Grant UNC315-EE-3636]

The effect of patent protection on inventor mobility

This paper investigates the effect of obtaining a patent on the mobility of employee inventors who are at the beginning of their careers. We suggest that patents make human capital more specific to the employer. As a result, we expect that patenting leads to lower levels of mobility. We draw on U.S. patent application data for the period 2001-2012 to analyze this issue. Using average examiner leniency as an exogenous source of variation in granted patents, we find that one additional patent granted decreases inventor mobility by approximately 25 percent. The estimated negative effect is nearly twice as large for discrete technologies (chemicals and pharmaceuticals) for which patent effectiveness is greater. The effect is also more pronounced in cases where the inventor's knowledge can be independently transferred (e.g., inventors with few coauthors) and for moves concerning technologically similar employers. The results have implications for the effect of patents on knowledge diffusion

Everything you Always Wanted to Know about Inventors (but Never Asked): Evidence from the PatVal-EU Survey

By drawing information from a survey of inventors of 9,017 European patents (PatVal-EU), this paper provides novel and detailed data about the characteristics of the European inventors, the sources of their knowledge, the importance of formal and informal collaborations among researchers and institutions, the motivations to invent, and the actual use and economic value of the patents. This is important information as the unavailability of direct indicators has limited the scope and depth of the empirical studies on innovation.

Markets for Inventors: Learning-by-Hiring as a Driver of Mobility

Hiring away inventors has long been recognized as a way of learning used by innovative firms. This paper claims that the characteristics of the knowledge accumulated by an inventor at his current employer affect what hiring firms can learn from him. The implication is that some inventors are more likely to be hired away than their coworkers. We analyze the relationship between the type of knowledge embodied by inventors working at IBM and their probability of moving. Relying on patent data to track the movement of inventors across firms and to characterize the kind of know-how they hold, we identify the following drivers of inventor mobility: the quality of their work; the complementarity of their knowledge with that of other inventors; and, to a lower extent, their expertise in the firm's core areas in which the firm is not a dominant player. Results confirm the role of knowledge characteristics behind the mobility of research and development personnel and suggest that learning is a relevant force in the market for inventors.mobility, learning-by-hiring, technology transfer, inventors