The determinants of parallel invention:Measuring the role of information sharing and personal interaction between inventors

Historical accounts describe numerous cases of parallel invention. Nowadays, with over half a million inventions yearly that apply for patent protection at the USPTO alone, it is likely that there are a lot of parallel inventions among these. Yet, the mechanisms behind creating similar knowledge remain unstudied. From both a theoretical and practical perspective, it is an interesting question to what degree parallel inventions take place truly independent of each other, or whether they are the result of the exchange of knowledge and ideas between inventors. In our empirical study, we use the unique setting of technical standardization, where it is possible to systematically observe knowledge sharing as well as knowledge exchanges between inventors in detail. This study presents two novel analyses, one focussing on the determinants of similar inventions (using an AI-based approach) and one on the determinants of identical inventions (exploiting data from the patent granting procedure). In both analyses, we find positive and significant effects for knowledge sharing as well as for inventor interaction as determinants. The latter effect is the strongest: if meet in person and discuss their ideas, the likelihood of similar inventions increases up to a factor of approximately five, to up to 2.3 percentage points. Empirically confirming the theoretical work of Amabile (1983, 1988) on knowledge creation at the individual level and that of Nonaka (1994, 2006) on knowledge creation at the organizational level, we reflect on the implications of our findings for companies wishing to increase their inventive efforts

Landscape Study of Potentially Essential Patents Disclosed to ETSI:A study carried out in the context of the EC ‘Pilot Study for Essentiality Assessment of Standard Essential Patents’ project

In November 2017, the European Commission issued a Communication ‘Setting out the EU approach to Standard Essential Patents’1 in which it calls for increasing transparency on SEP2 exposure. In 2020, the European Commission published a commissioned report3 that aims to evaluate the technical and institutional feasibility of performing large-scale essentiality checks of patents, titled ‘Pilot project for essentiality checks of Standard Essential Patents’.This study is a companion to the above report. Since patents disclosed at Standards Developing Organisations (SDOs) may be a starting point of such essentiality analyses, this study aims to (1) provide a patent landscape analysis of SDO disclosed patents (and what this implies for their use as input to an essentiality assessment mechanism) and (2) analyse whether SDO disclosed patents differ from comparable other patents in quality (both technical merit and economic value). This study focuses on patents disclosed to the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), This SDO is not only very important in the field of telecommunications, but also maintains one of the best databases of such disclosures to date

Preserving the Royalty-Free Standards Ecosystem

It has long been recognized in Europe and elsewhere that standards-development organizations (SDOs) may adopt policies that require their participants to license patents essential to the SDO’s standards (standards-essential patents or SEPs) to manufacturers of standardized products (“implementers”) on a royalty-free (RF) basis.1 This requirement contrasts with SDO policies that permit SEP holders to charge implementers monetary patent royalties, sometimes on terms that are specified as “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” (FRAND). As demonstrated by two decades of intensive litigation around the world, FRAND royalties have given rise to intractable disputes regarding the manner in which such royalties should be calculated and adjudicated. In contrast, standards distributed on an RF basis are comparatively free from litigation and the attendant transaction costs.2 Accordingly, numerous SDOs around the world have adopted RF licensing policies and many widely adopted standards, including Bluetooth, USB, IPv6, HTTP, HTML and XML, are distributed on an RF basis. This note briefly discusses the commercial considerations surrounding RF standards, the relationship between RF standards and open source software (OSS) and the SDO policy mechanisms – including “universal reciprocity” -- that enable RF licensing to succeed in the marketplace