Modern IP licensing practices: new actors and new strategies

Start-Ups and Licensing Agreements: New Insights from Case Studies. Walking into the Room with IP: Exploring Start-ups’ IP Licensing Strategy. Learn and Let Learn. Re-inventing the Licensing Dilemma: An Explorative Study. Oh! The Places You’ll Go! Technology Trajectories in the Presence of External Technology Search. Overall Conclusions and Implications. Future Research Pipeline.Start-Ups and Licensing Agreements: New Insights from Case Studies. Walking into the Room with IP: Exploring Start-ups’ IP Licensing Strategy. Learn and Let Learn. Re-inventing the Licensing Dilemma: An Explorative Study. Oh! The Places You’ll Go! Technology Trajectories in the Presence of External Technology Search. Overall Conclusions and Implications. Future Research Pipeline.LUISS PhD Thesi

Modern IP licensing practices: new actors and new strategies

Start-Ups and Licensing Agreements: New Insights from Case Studies. Walking into the Room with IP: Exploring Start-ups\u2019 IP Licensing Strategy. Learn and Let Learn. Re-inventing the Licensing Dilemma: An Explorative Study. Oh! The Places You\u2019ll Go! Technology Trajectories in the Presence of External Technology Search. Overall Conclusions and Implications. Future Research Pipeline

Start-Ups and Licensing Agreements: An Exploratory Case Study

Licensing agreements can exist between established companies but they increasingly also give rise to start-up companies, built around the licensed technology. Licensing-out technology can represent a risk as well as an opportunity for any licensor as there is a trade-off between additional revenues that can be gained from the licensing agreement and the costs related to the transfer itself, as well as the risks of opportunism by the licensee. When licensing to a start-up, this risk is higher, as start-ups have scarce resources, high failure rates and no past performance on which to gauge the start-up’s success. For the start-up the license could also represent a risk in the form of sunk costs and constraints on their evolution path. This paper discusses under which conditions technology licensing between a licensor and a start-up can be beneficial to both parties. Through a qualitative analysis, interviewing a number of European start-ups, we will examine in particular the role of contractual clauses, the relationship between licensor and licensee, the role of the licensed technology in the final product and the role of a technology push versus demand-pull scenario in a licensing deal. For all these aspects we will reflect on their influence on the licensor and licensee

Data science for engineering design: State of the art and future directions

Abstract Engineering design (ED) is the process of solving technical problems within requirements and constraints to create new artifacts. Data science (DS) is the inter-disciplinary field that uses computational systems to extract knowledge from structured and unstructured data. The synergies between these two fields have a long story and throughout the past decades, ED has increasingly benefited from an integration with DS. We present a literature review at the intersection between ED and DS, identifying the tools, algorithms and data sources that show the most potential in contributing to ED, and identifying a set of challenges that future data scientists and designers should tackle, to maximize the potential of DS in supporting effective and efficient designs. A rigorous scoping review approach has been supported by Natural Language Processing techniques, in order to offer a review of research across two fuzzy-confining disciplines. The paper identifies challenges related to the two fields of research and to their interfaces. The main gaps in the literature revolve around the adaptation of computational techniques to be applied in the peculiar context of design, the identification of data sources to boost design research and a proper featurization of this data. The challenges have been classified considering their impacts on ED phases and applicability of DS methods, giving a map for future research across the fields. The scoping review shows that to fully take advantage of DS tools there must be an increase in the collaboration between design practitioners and researchers in order to open new data driven opportunities

When vicarious learning rewards the originating firm: Exploring the learning opportunities available to the licensor

Why should companies engage in licensing-out? While conventional wisdom mostly focuses on the financial and commercial benefits available to the licensor, this paper points to the learning opportunities entailed in licensing agreements. We develop an exploratory study built around a longitudinal cross-industry database of 558 licensing deals and we apply the vicarious learning framework to analyze the learning opportunities exploited by the licensor, as a result of engaging with a particular licensee in the first place. We investigate the licensor-licensee dyads on several dimensions, capturing their profiles and the different learning opportunities exploited; we also compare dyads that invert their role in a subsequent round to dyads that do not to understand whether there are difference in terms of learning patterns. Findings offer several insights consistent with a learning scenario, thus prompting further empirical research

Balancing the future space workforce: A European perspective

The aerospace sector has traditionally had an unbalanced representation of women at different hierarchical levels. These unbalances have not gone unnoticed and have sparked a series of initiatives across the board, in line with current global trends that are promoting the inclusion of women in all aspects of the labour force. Many programs have been implemented, either conducted at the individual firm level or through associations such as the IAF, with its 3G diversity initiative, and the United Nations, with its initiative on Space for Women, and the association Women in Aerospace Europe, to name a few. The latter association, in agreement with its members, has recently appointed a Director of Research, that will attempt to add a layer of previously missing information that may support the aerospace industry during the on-going transition towards a more diverse workforce. This article is an outline of the main research topics that the new Director of Research has identified in these first few months in office, and in preliminary consultations with women in leading positions in the field. It is meant to constitute a first proposal, a canvas, through which discussion can be stimulated and new questions can be brought to the fore. It will include considerations both on historical data that may be useful to collect and disseminate, as well as an outline for research on three key fields: company practices, the perspectives of individual women, and program outcomes. Its asp a call for a cooperation within the field towards more open data sharing between organisations, that could greatly contribute towards a more rigorous research and greater insights for all involved

Open service innovation for a new space economy

Satellite-based data is becoming increasingly available and precise, and it has worked its way into many applications that support our everyday lives. Wishing to harness the economic potential of this data, governments are attempting to kickstart a New Space Economy, using enabling technologies such as ICT and collaborative environments as spelled out by the open innovation paradigm, in order to stimulate the creation of commercial downstream services around the available information. This paper examines how open innovation principles are and could further be applied in the context of space downstream services, specifically exploring the European Galileo and Copernicus programs, in order to support the emergence of a new service-based economy. Indeed, in the global context, an increasing proportion of companies' revenues stems from services, and these are becoming a key differentiation tool in the competitive landscape. Space-based services could therefore supply companies with new business models that will enable them to keep abreast of their competitors and provide a higher value to customers. Open innovation occurs when companies do not only rely on their internal processes and RD to perform innovation, engaging the whole spectrum of available collaborators and stakeholders to bring new ideas to market. The stream of open services innovation specifically studies how to apply open innovation principles to the realm of service management, in order to develop innovative services that better embrace customers' needs. Key principles of this type of innovation include re-designing business models from product-based to service-based models, built around the concept of customer utility. Customers should also be fully engaged in co-creation processes, helping to shape services around their specific needs and providing real-time feedback on the business models being implemented. In an open innovation approach, a specialisation should be sought between complementary actors such as suppliers, competitors and key stakeholders in order to create more efficient processes, where assets and knowledge can be shared. Finally the use of platforms to standardise information and to communicate between actors should be encouraged. A more in-depth elaboration of this model will be presented with practical examples and recommendations for key stakeholders

Intellectual property management strategies of start-ups in space-related innovation

Appropriability measures such as patents, trademarks and copyrights can be important to encourage innovation. Especially in a technology-intensive sector, companies regularly need to invest large amounts of money in RD and infrastructure at the outset, thereby increasing their motivation to protect and appropriate the results of their efforts. This becomes particularly important in a scenario where the industry is attempting to increase business from the private sector, for example launching a space-based services market. We therefore concentrate on strategies of intellectual property management of startups arising around space technologies. In this context, we examine IP management practices in two different innovation settings that are typical of aerospace, (1) technology transfers from industry and space agencies, and (2) RD for new technology stemming from the participation in grand innovation challenges. For many years, the European Space Agency has established recommendations to both encourage innovation and defend the European industrial competitiveness, leading to an articulate IPR management strategy. This strategy is also used to create a number of startups who commercialize space technology in different terrestrial sectors. The IP management strategy initially adopted by the technology originator has repercussions on the start-up as well as ensuing technology trajectories. The second part of the paper covers the "Google Lunar X Prize" (GLXP) highlighting the differences of strategic approaches of teams to manage IP in dependence of their nature and origin of foundation and their specific situation on the trajectory path to become a successful contestant. In particular, questions to be answered cover e.g. which IP rights remain with the competitor and what part will be ceded to the organizer, as well as what part of IP will be revealed through the publication of the specific problem. We discover that circumstances around the foundation of a contestant team and its nature determines their subsequent approach towards management of IP. These two studies cover a wide spectrum of different scenarios and encourage a deeper reflection on the role of IP management in fostering innovation within and from space technologies. Moreover, insights from this paper could be considered in other sectors, such as Key Enabling Technologies, where heavy RD investments are carried out, often sponsored by research institutes or government entities, to achieve technological breakthroughs, and the novelty of emerging sectors encourages the presence of entrepreneurship

Start-Ups and Licensing Agreements: An Exploratory Case Study

Licensing agreements can exist between established companies but they increasingly also give rise to start-up companies, built around the licensed technology. Licensing-out technology can represent a risk as well as an opportunity for any licensor as there is a trade-off between additional revenues that can be gained from the licensing agreement and the costs related to the transfer itself, as well as the risks of opportunism by the licensee. When licensing to a start-up, this risk is higher, as start-ups have scarce resources, high failure rates and no past performance on which to gauge the start-up’s success. For the start-up the license could also represent a risk in the form of sunk costs and constraints on their evolution path. This paper discusses under which conditions technology licensing between a licensor and a start-up can be beneficial to both parties. Through a qualitative analysis, interviewing a number of European start-ups, we will examine in particular the role of contractual clauses, the relationship between licensor and licensee, the role of the licensed technology in the final product and the role of a technology push versus demand-pull scenario in a licensing deal. For all these aspects we will reflect on their influence on the licensor and licensee