how to best ensure remuneration for creators in the market for music copyright and its alternatives the focus of this essay is to examine the market for copyrighted works with a particular emphasis on the sound recording market this market is currently in a state of flux some would say disarray due to the ability of the internet to lower transmission costs for both authorized and unauthorized copies with the latter being at this time far more prevalent in this essay we discuss the intent of copyright the role of copying and file sharing and some alternative production consumption schemes meant to strengthen or to replace copyright

patents citations innovations a window on the knowledge economy a b jaffe m trajtenberg eds mit press 2002 478 pp 33 50 isbn 0 262 10095 9

privatizing the intellectual commons universities and the commercialization of biotechnology abstract this paper analyzes universities recent attempts to adapt their policies and organizational arrangements in order to accommodate the commercialization of university biotechnology research we argue that these attempts have been severely hampered because internal and external parties have sought to enforce universities adherence to their historic commitment to create and sustain an intellectual commons for the benefit of society at large the standardized organizational arrangements universities maintain to administer this intellectual commons have also served to impede adaptive efforts we conclude that social contractual commitments and organizational standards can significantly affect the shape and outcome of negotiations over property rights and can place important limits on the scope of organizations potentially leading to the generation of new organizational forms

beyond the hype intellectual property and the knowledge society knowledge economy this paper explores the debates surrounding whether or not we have now moved into a new knowledge economy andsor knowledge society and if so whether this shift is as significant and as far reaching as the industrial revolution in this possible transformation the place of information communications technologies has been crucial debate has occurred across both economics and sociology with differing emphases as is shown in the ranges of definitions that we review in the paper one consistent factor is the lack of clarity and consistency between them both within and across the disciplines in order to explore the issues that the debates raises in a more grounded way the paper explores them in relation to intellectual property ip and the intellectual commons in the process of innovation growth and economic development the paper is developed through an analysis first of the industrial revolution and the role within this of uncertainty technologies complementarities and elective affinities and the way ip was protected and controlled through patents secrecy being first to the market and copyright the second part of the paper examines definitions of the knowledge economy and society and the role within these of information communication technologies in order to explore whether the ways that ip is protected and controlled have changed in the debate about the knowledge economy and society the role of innovation via human capital with a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities has been emphasized the role of ip thus remains central but is now challenged by the rise of new forms of communication which make its protection harder and move much of the concern with respect to regulation to a global rather than national and local level copyright 2006 the authors journal compilation 2006 blackwell publishing ltd

licensing of university inventions the role of a technology transfer office abstract we develop a theoretical model to explain the specific role of technology transfer offices ttos in licensing university inventions using a framework where firms have incomplete information on the quality of inventions we develop a reputation argument for the tto to reduce the asymmetric information problem our results indicate that a tto is often able to benefit from its capacity to pool innovations across research units and to build a reputation within universities we identify when the technology seller will have an incentive to shelve some of the projects thus raising the buyer s beliefs on expected quality this results in fewer but more valuable innovations being sold at higher prices we explain the importance of a critical size for the tto to be successful as well as the stylized fact that ttos may lead to fewer licensing agreements but higher income from innovation transfers

reward structures in a planned economy some difficulties there is an extensive literature on the socially optimal pricing policy for public firms but much less attention has been paid to the vital question of how managers of public firms can be induced to follow such policies the politicians or planners who seek to control a public enterprise will be less well informed about cost and demand functions than the manager and there is no reason to suppose that managers are altruists thus with asymmetrical information and selfish managers there is a significant control problem recently tam 1981 has suggested an ingenious iterative incentive mechanism designed to surmount this problem this note a argues that her negative price incentive scheme npis will not achieve its objective of guiding managers to price at marginal cost2 and b compares npis with variants of the performance index pi proposed by scott 1952 1978 and finsinger and vogelsang 1980a 1981 tam s proposal is that the manager of a public firm be paid a bonus b each period

vector autoregression cointegration and causality testing for causes of the british industrial revolution the existence timing and possible causes of the british industrial revolution are considered by investigating the time series properties of industrial production and various explanatory variables utilising two types of robust cointegration based causality tests we argue that domestic forces notably technological progress shaped the industrial revolution whereas overseas trade expansion was mainly a consequence of industrial growth results from granger type var tests are contrasted with those of toda and phillips working paper 91 07 university of western australia 1991b where the latter manifest some of the potential problems raised by the authors when applied to a data set of this type an understanding of the possible causes of the first industrial revolution may shed more general light on the forces promoting industrialization and growth to the extent that the first industrial revolution offers a template exports appear not to provide a simple pathway to industrialization

an empirical study of scientific production a cross country analysis 1981 2002 abstract this paper presents the results of an econometric approach to examine the determinants of scientific production at cross country level the paper aims not to provide accurate and robust estimates of investment elasticities a doubtful task given the poor quality of the data sources and the modelling problems but to develop and critically assess the validity of an empirical approach for characterising the production of science and its impact from a comparative perspective we employ and discuss the limitations of a production function approach to relate investment inputs to scientific outputs using a sample of 14 countries for which we have information on higher education research and development herd the outputs are taken from the thomson isi national science indicators 2002 database on published papers and citations the inputs and outputs for this sample of countries have been recorded for a period of 21 years 1981 2002 a thorough discussion of the data shortcomings is provided on the basis of this panel dataset we investigate the profile of the time lag between investment in herd and research output and returns to national investment in science we devote particular attention to analysing the presence of cross country spillovers we show their relevance and underline the international effect of the us system

the economics of rising stars this paper analyzes an occupation in which there is substantial uncertainty about individual performance and past performance is correlated with future outcomes in equilibrium only the young enter the occupation and only the successful stay on the young are numerous and earn incomes well below what their current alternative o ffers success is rare and rewarded highly the implied distribution of earnings must have positive skewness copyright 1988 by american economic association

proprietary versus public domain licensing of software and research products abstract we study the production of knowledge when many researchers or inventors are involved in a setting where tensions can arise between individual public and private contributions we first show that without some kind of coordination production of the public knowledge good science or research software or database is sub optimal then we demonstrate that if lead researchers are able to establish a norm of contribution to the public good a better outcome can be achieved and we show that the general public license gpl used in the provision of open source software is one such mechanism our results are then applied to the specific setting where the knowledge being produced is software or a database that will be used by academic researchers and possibly by private firms using as an example a product familiar to economists econometric software we conclude by discussing some of the ways in which pricing can ameliorate the problem of providing these products to academic researchers

reassessing patent propensity evidence from a dataset of r d awards 1977 2004 it is well known that not all innovations are patented but the exact volume of innovative activities undertaken outside the coverage of patent protection and relatedly the actual propensity to patent an innovation in different contexts remain to a major degree a matter of speculation this paper presents an exploratory study comparing systematically patented and unpatented innovations over the period 1977 2004 across industrial sectors the main data source is the r d 100 awards competition organized by the journal research and development since 1963 the magazine has been awarding this prize to the 100 most technologically significant new products available for sale or licensing in the year preceding the judgments we match the products winners of the r d 100 awards competition with uspto patents and we examine the variation of patent propensity across different contexts industries geographical areas and organizations finally we compare our findings with previous assessments of patent propensity based on several sources of data

corporate science in the patent system an analysis of the semiconductor technology corporate scientific publications are often presented as a strategic means for firms to create prior art with the objective to prevent others from patenting related inventions this presumes that corporate publications enter the pool of prior art which is relevant to judge the novelty of patent applications at the patent office and that corporate science has the power to block patent applications this paper analyses for the first time whether the presumed mechanism behind corporate publications as a means to preempt patents works with focus on the semiconductor technology our results show that scientific publications by corporations challenge the novelty of patent applications at the european patent office epo significantly more than other pieces of prior art detailed information from the epo patent examination procedure allows us to show that corporate publications threaten the novelty of patent applications if combined with other pieces of prior art like patents rather than as standalone documents this supports the view that corporate scientific publishing can be an effective means for firms to protect their freedom to operate if used as a complementary part of a firms overall ip protection strategy as proposed by scholars in the field of law and management science

market structure and performance in intellectual property the case of copyright collectives abstract copyright collectives are associations to whom authors transfer copyrights for purposes of exploitation these collectives grant licenses for the use of works in their repertory they negotiate and collect royalties which they distribute to their members and they take legal actions against those who infringe the copyrights to which they hold title this paper investigates the consequences of the formation of collectives on the number of copyrighted works produced and circulation of these works in the framework of a model of joint production welfare issues are also addressed

fishing upstream firm innovation strategy and university research alliances this paper examines how innovation strategy influences firms level of involvement with university based research our results suggest that firms with internal r d strategies more heavily weighted toward exploratory activities allocate a greater share of their r d resources to exploratory university research and develop deeper multifaceted relationships with their university research partners in addition firms with more centralized internal r d organizations spend a greater share of their r d dollars on exploratory research conducted at universities in contrast to other external partners we find evidence suggesting that universities are preferred when the firm perceives potential conflicts over intellectual property 2007 elsevier b v all rights reserved

universities and fundamental research reflections on the growth of university industry partnerships the recent rise in university industry partnerships has stimulated an important public policy debate regarding how these relationships affect fundamental research in this paper we examine the antecedents and consequences of policies to promote university industry alliances although the preliminary evidence appears to suggest that these partnerships have not had a deleterious effect on the quantity and quality of basic research some legitimate concerns have been raised about these activities that require additional analysis we conclude that additional research is needed to provide a more accurate assessment of the optimal level of commercialisation

leveraging knowledge as a competitive asset the intensity performance and structure of universities entrepreneurial knowledge exchange activities at a regional level universities are no longer considered to be isolated islands of knowledge but as institutions increasingly engaged with a range of external partners through entrepreneurial activities this paper examines the associations between the intensity and performance of knowledge exchange activities undertaken in uk universities with non academic actors drawing on data concerning the structural factors of interactions of universities in the uk with external partners the paper sheds further light on the nature of these activities through a prism of competitive and uncompetitive regions in order to better understand how universities may be able to leverage both their knowledge and partnerships more effectively as competitive assets on the one hand it is found that academics in uncompetitive regions are more intensively engaged in entrepreneurial activities but generate less income from them than their counterparts in competitive regions suggesting that there are differences in the income generating capacity of academics across regions on the other hand academic knowledge is found to be more strongly bounded within a certain distance in uncompetitive regions whilst geographical distance seems less of a hindrance to academics in competitive regions

stationary sunspot equilibrium in a cash in advance economy abstract in this paper we demonstrate the existence and uniqueness of a class of stationary sunspot equilibria in the cash in advance economy of lucas and stokey sunspots affect not only the price of money but prices of productive assets assets prices may fluctuate forever below their market fundamentals

what s in a sign trademark law and economic theory the aim of this paper is to summarize the extant theory as it relates to the economics of trademark and to give some suggestions for further research with reference to distinct streams of literature the proposed line of study inevitably looks at the complex relationship between signs and economics copyright 2006 the authors journal compilation 2006 blackwell publishing ltd

copyright and artists a view from cultural economics most of the standard economic literature on copyright ignores a number of aspects that have considerable significance for cultural production and for artists the primary creators of copyright works the supply of which copyright is supposed to stimulate specifically there is little mention in that literature of moral rights no distinction is made between copyright for authors and neighbouring rights for performers the distributional effects of copyright are barely referred to and the question of how much artists earn from copyright is ignored in this article i survey work that relates copyright and cultural economics showing that cultural economics offers another view to the standard economics of copyright moreover the case for government intervention in the arts and heritage made by cultural economists has resonance for the economic rationale of copyright

the impact of academic patenting on university research and its transfer abstract this paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the impact of academic patenting on publishing and knowledge transfer drawing upon two separate surveys of academics and their cv information we provide empirical evidence for uk academics in engineering and physical sciences the contribution of this paper is two fold first our findings show that the intensity of academic patenting complements publishing up to a certain level of patenting output after which we find evidence of a substitution effect we also find weak evidence of important differences across scientific fields with the more basic oriented fields showing indications of a crowding out effect second our analysis of the potential impact of patenting on knowledge transfer shows a positive correlation between the stock of patents and engagement in knowledge transfer channels however we find that a substitution effect sets in indicating an inverted u shaped relationship between patenting and several knowledge transfer channels

knowledge creates markets the influence of entrepreneurial support and patent rights on academic entrepreneurship we use an exogenous change in german federal law to examine how entrepreneurial support and the ownership of patent rights influence academic entrepreneurship in 2002 the german federal government enacted a major reform called knowledge creates markets that set up new infrastructure to facilitate university industry technology transfer and shifted the ownership of patent rights from university researchers to their universities based on a novel researcher level panel database that includes a control group not affected by the policy change we find no evidence that the new infrastructure resulted in an increase in start up companies by university researchers the shift in patent rights may have strengthened the relationship between patents on university discovered inventions and university start ups however it substantially decreased the volume of patents with the largest decrease taking place in faculty firm patenting relationships

university entrepreneurship and professor privilege this article analyzes how institutional differences affect university entrepreneurship we focus on ownership of faculty inventions and compare two institutional regimes the united states and sweden in the united states the bayh dole act gives universities the right to own inventions from publicly funded research whereas in sweden the professor privilege gives the university faculty this right we develop a theoretical model and examine the effects of institutional differences on modes of commercialization entrepreneurship or licenses to established firms as well as on probabilities of successful commercialization we find that the us system is less conducive to entrepreneurship than the swedish system if established firms have some advantage over faculty startups and that on average the probability of successful commercialization is somewhat higher in the united states we also use the model to perform four policy experiments as suggested by recent policy debates in both countries copyright 2013 the author 2013 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc oxford university press

characteristics of patent litigation a window on competition we examine the patenting behavior of firms in an industry characterized by rapid technological change and cumulative innovation recent survey evidence suggests that semiconductor firms do not rely heavily on patents to appropriate returns to r d yet the propensity of semiconductor firms to patent has risen dramatically since the mid 1980s we explore this apparent paradox by conducting interviews with industry representatives and analyzing the patenting behavior of 95 u s semiconductor firms during 1979 1995 the results suggest that the 1980s strengthening of u s patent rights spawned patent portfolio races among capital intensive firms but it also facilitated entry by specialized design firms copyright 2001 by the rand corporation

impact on firms of the use of knowledge external sources a systematic review of the literature this study summarizes the main conclusions from a systematic review of the empirical literature regarding the impact on firms of the use of knowledge external sources universities research institutes and knowledge intensive business services with the aim to organize the literature we classify the different works according to the research question addressed i which firms use knowledge external sources ii do firms using knowledge external sources achieve better results and iii which firms benefit the most from using knowledge external sources stylized facts are that larger more r d intensive and high tech firms are more likely to use knowledge external sources and that use of knowledge external sources is associated to firms higher technical results less attention has been paid to the third question and evidence is not conclusive several recommendations for future research emerge first to take in greater consideration methodological issues so that potential biases in the results caused by sample selection and endogeneity are handled properly second to pay more attention to heterogeneous outcomes third to use continuous indicators of depth and breadth of links allowing for non linear relationships and fourth to extend evidence for developing countries and service industries

what makes companies pursue an open science strategy whereas recent scholarly research has provided many insights about universities engaging in commercial activities there is still little empirical evidence regarding the opposite phenomenon of companies disseminating scientific knowledge our paper aims to fill this gap and explores the motivations of firms that disclose research outcomes in a scientific format besides considering a dimension internal to the firm we focus particularly on knowledge sourcing from academic institutions and the appropriability regime we conduct an econometric analysis with firm level data from the fourth edition of the french innovation survey cis and matched scientific publications for a sample of 2512 rd performing firms from all manufacturing sectors this analysis provides evidence that firms are more likely to adopt academic principles if they need to access scientific knowledge that is considered important for their innovation development whereas the mere existence of collaborative links with academic institutions is not a strong determinant furthermore the results suggest that the inclination of firms to publish is sensitive to the level of knowledge spillovers in a sector and the effectiveness of legal appropriation instruments c 2013 elsevier b v all rights reserved

federal funding and the rate and direction of inventive activity abstract leveraging a new measure of patent citation trees corredoira and banerjee 2015 we demonstrate that research funded by the federal government is associated with more active and diverse technological trajectories our findings tie government funding to breakthrough inventions the differences are especially evident at the upper percentiles of the distribution of long term patent influence and stem primarily from research conducted outside the federal government and sponsored by the dod hhs and nsf government funded patents are inputs into a broader range of technologies additional analyses indicate that federal programs invest in some technological areas that private corporations eschew and federally funded university patents are in different technological classes than non federally funded university patents in this sense the government may play an irreplaceable role in the rate and direction of inventive activity generally speaking the scientific agencies of government are not so concerned with immediate practical objectives as are the laboratories of industry nor on the other hand are they as free to explore any natural phenomena without regard to possible economic applications as are the educational and private research institutions vannevar bush science the endless frontier 1945

university research intellectual property rights and european innovation systems this paper surveys the literature on university patenting from the point of view of the economic theory of patents it is argued that patenting knowledge developed by university researchers is paradoxical patents are normally intended to stimulate knowledge development by providing property rights but universities operate also under a different incentive scheme i e they receive public funds to perform socially useful knowledge in the debate surrounding the so called bayh dole act in the usa it has however been argued that patents on university inventions may be necessary to stimulate technology transfer from universities to private firms the first part of the paper addresses two major questions first what is the economic logic of bayh dole and second what were the effects on universities and the knowledge they develop in the second part the paper addresses the issue of whether bayh dole like legislation would be beneficial for european countries in a number of european countries a suggestion has been made that this could enhance knowledge transfer from the public to the private sector using a new database resulting from a survey among patent inventors in six european countries an assessment is given of the degree of university patenting in europe because university researchers are often involved in patented inventions without the university being listed as a patent applicant statistics based on the patent office databases alone often underestimate university patenting in europe the paper ends with a discussion of how this european practice of university patenting affects public private knowledge transfer in europe and how this compares to the effects of the bayh dole act in the usa

observational equivalence of the overlapping generations and the cash in advance economies abstract this paper demonstrates that any equilibrium in an overlapping generations economy a la grandmont 1985 can be supported as an equilibrium in a cash in advance economy a la lucas and stokey 1987 and vice versa thus business cycles could occur at real life frequencies

on endogenous competitive business cycles the belief that the long run equilibrium of a competitive monetary economy that does not experience any exogeneous shocks whether originating from the external environment or from policy should be modelled as a state that is stationary or perhaps growing at a constant rate seems to be deeply rooted in the mind of some economists

reward structures in a planned economy the problem of incentives and efficient allocation of resources this paper considers a reward mechanism for inducing the choice of a socially optimal level of output by a socialist price setting manager under this mechanism the planner is assumed to have no information other than the observed output and price level it thus has informational advantages over other schemes thus far discussed in the literature the other schemes require the additional knowledge of demand elasticities of all the products produced in the economy besides this informational advantage the reward structure suggested here also eliminates other basic weaknesses of those schemes suggested previously

technology policy for a world of skew distributed outcomes abstract this paper draws implications for technology policy from evidence on the size distribution of returns from eight sets of data on inventions and innovations attributable to private sector firms and universities the distributions are all highly skew the top 10 of sample members captured from 48 to 93 percent of total sample returns it follows that programs seeking to advance technology should not be judged negatively if they lead to numerous economic failures rather emphasis should be placed on the relatively few big successes to achieve noteworthy success with appreciable confidence a sizeable array of projects must often be supported the outcome distributions are sufficiently skewed that even with large numbers of projects it is not possible to diversify away substantial residual variability through portfolio strategies

indigenous knowledge and intellectual property a sustainability agenda the paper argues that the current ways of protecting intellectual property are limited in their scope for recognizing indigenous rights to indigenous knowledge indigenous knowledge is often defined as being holistic and collectively owned and an appropriate protection should allow for maintaining the cultural and physical environment that has generated it after examining the failure of the patent system to recognize indigenous input using examples from the us patent and trademark office the analysis is directed towards alternatives the world s first case of indigenous intellectual accreditation through the partnership between mt romance australian sandalwood company aveda us based multinational cosmetics corporation and the kutkabubba community represented by the songman circle of wisdom is presented the accreditation allows for the indigenous people to be recognized as traditional owners of the land and for their care and knowledge about the sandalwood trees it also gives them a share of the profits made from the contemporary use of the pure sandalwood oil the paper argues that sustainability and indigenous sustainability in particular provides a conceptual framework for a change in the way of protecting intellectual property this implies that appropriate policies should be put in place for businesses to feel responsible towards the community

a survey of the literature on human capital intensive firms the aim of this paper is to provide an exhaustive survey of the academic research dedicated to the study of human capital intensive firms hcifs we use a bibliometric analysis based on the three widely used databases econlit science direct and wiley over the period 1992 2015 we are adapting a methodology developed in previous works to our specific object of study and we generate a bottom up clustering on keywords titles and abstracts our examination of the data sheds a light on five main clusters of works that respectively focus on 1 critical human resource management 2 intellectual capital assessment 3 funding risk and innovation 4 high skilled employees supporting economic development and 5 internal and external valuable social networks in a critical appraisal of our results we stress that the bibliometric analysis remains silent on how the different clusters are linked with each other based on our own appreciation of the hcifs literature we propose a further step in the identification of a central question linking up these clusters a transversal review of the five clusters reveals that hcifs appear as a network of specialized agents whose complementary human resources are decisive for the value creation process

where are we now on cultural economics a survey of progress in cultural economics since its virtual birth in 1966 with the publication of baumol and bowen performing arts the economic dilemma distinguishing between theoretical progress and empirical progress following in the footsteps of towse s recent anthology of classic papers in cultural economics i address nine topics that between them cover the subject namely 1 taste and taste formation 2 demand and supply studies 3 the media industries 4 the art market 5 the economic history of the arts 6 the labour market for artists 7 baumol s cost disease 8 non profit arts organisations and 9 public subsidies to the arts i conclude that there has been some theoretical and empirical progress in the treatment of almost all these topics

production of university technological knowledge in european regions evidence from patent data acosta m coronado d leon m d and martinez m a production of university technological knowledge in european regions evidence from patent data regional studies this paper explores the european regional distribution of the production of new technological knowledge generated by universities as measured by patent counts the empirical basis for this study is a unique panel data set of 4580 european university patents from 1998 to 2004 the main findings were a strong regional and sectoral concentration of patents and no average relation between university technological specialization and industrial specialization furthermore the results suggest that variations in regional research and development funding do affect patenting activities in regions with elasticities showing constant returns to scale but no evidence was found regarding the industrial potential of the region encouraging the production of new university technological knowledge acosta m coronado d leon m d et martinez m a la

the quality factor in patent systems this article develops a methodology to compare the quality of examination services in three major patent systems quality is defined as the extent to which patent systems comply with the patentability conditions in a transparent way the methodology consists of a two layer analytical framework encompassing legal standards ls and their operational design od which includes several interdependent components that affect the stringency and transparency of the filtering process the comparison of patent systems in europe japan and the united states shows that their operational designs differ substantially the european system provides higher quality and more expensive examination services than the united states one while the japanese patent system is in an intermediate position the results illustrate that different system designs lead to different outcomes in terms of backlogs patent propensity and the number of dubious patent rights in force in this respect these findings i provide an empirical validation of the conjecture of a vicious cycle linking the quality of examination and demand for patents and ii highlight the need for a multifaceted convergence of patent systems before mutual recognition is put in place the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved

academic patent quality and quantity before and after the bayh dole act in the united states abstract this paper summarizes the results of empirical analyses of data on the characteristics of the pre and post 1980 patents of three leading us academic patenters the university of california stanford university and columbia university we complement the analysis of these institutions with an analysis of the characteristics of the patents issued to all us universities before and after 1980 our analysis suggests that the effects of the bayh dole act on the content of academic research and patenting at stanford and the university of california were modest the most significant change in the content of research at these universities one associated with increased patenting and licensing at both universities before and after 1980 was the rise of biomedical research and inventive activity but bayh dole had little to do with this growth both uc and stanford university administrators intensified their efforts to market faculty inventions in the wake of bayh dole this enlargement of the pool of marketed inventions appears to have reduced the commercial yield of this population at both universities but we find no decline in the importance or generality of the post 1980 patents of these two universities the analysis of overall us university patenting suggests that the patents issued to institutions that entered into patenting and licensing after the effective date of the bayh dole act are indeed less important and less general than the patents issued before and after 1980 to us universities with longer experience in patenting inexperienced academic patenters appear to have obtained patents that proved to be less significant in terms of the rate and breadth of their subsequent citations than those issuing to more experienced university patenters bayh dole s effects on entry therefore may be as important as any effects of the act on the internal research culture of us universities in explaining any decline in the importance and generality of us academic patents after 1980

reconsidering the bayh dole act and the current university invention ownership model abstract the bayh dole act of 1980 provided u s universities with the right to commercialize employees inventions made while engaged in government funded research this paper argues that the current university invention ownership model in which universities maintain de jure ownership of inventions is not optimal either in terms of economic efficiency or for advancing the social interest of rapidly commercializing technology and encouraging entrepreneurship we argue that this model is plagued by ineffective incentives information asymmetries and contradictory motivations for the university the inventors potential licensees and university technology licensing offices tlos these structural uncertainties can lead to delays in licensing misaligned incentives among parties and obstacles to the flow of scientific information and the materials necessary for scientific progress the institutional arrangements within which tlos are embedded have encouraged some of them to become revenue maximizers rather than facilitators of technology dissemination for the good of the entire society we suggest two alternative invention commercialization models as superior alternatives the first alternative is to vest ownership with the inventor who could choose the commercialization path for the invention for this privilege the inventor would provide the university an ownership stake in any returns to the invention the inventor would be free to contract with the university tlo or any other entity that might assist in commercialization the second alternative is to make all inventions immediately publicly available through a public domain strategy or through a requirement that all inventions be licensed non exclusively both alternatives would address the current dysfunctional arrangements in university technology commercialization

evidence on how academics manage their portfolio of knowledge transfer activities abstract the purpose of this paper is to explore whether six broad categories of knowledge transfer activities undertaken by academics the creation and diffusion of knowledge through publications transmission of knowledge through teaching informal knowledge transfer patenting spin off formation and consulting activities are complementary substitute or independent as well as the conditions under which complementarities substitution and independence among these activities are likely to emerge this investigation relied on data regarding 1554 researchers funded by the natural sciences and engineering research council of canada contrary to prior studies which have examined complementarities and the determinants of knowledge transfer activities in separate models this study relied on a multivariate path model to reflect the fact that in practice academics consider simultaneously whether or not to undertake multiple knowledge transfer activities overall the results point to the existence of three very different types of knowledge transfer portfolios of activities a first portfolio made up of complementary activities which are interdependent and reinforce each other this portfolio includes publications patenting spin off creation consulting and informal knowledge transfer a second portfolio includes teaching activities and publication outputs which are substitute for each other a third portfolio comprises teaching activities and other activities independent from teaching namely patenting spin off creation consulting and informal knowledge transfer each of these three portfolios of knowledge transfer activities emerged under different conditions implications are derived for managerial practice and future research

high growth firms in changing competitive environments the us pharmaceutical industry 1963 to 2002 firms across sectors and regions are highly skewed in their ability to engage with innovation and even more skewed in their ability to translate investments in innovation into higher growth recent attention has been placed on the importance of high growth firms hgf for innovation policy our paper explores under what conditions hgf matter for translating r d investments into economic growth and how this depends on firm specific and industry specific factors we use quantile regression techniques to study the r d growth relationship in hgf compared to low growth firms unlike previous studies we pay particular attention to whether this relationship depends on the particular period in the industry s life cycle we focus on the us pharmaceutical industry from 1963 to 2002 and find that the r d growth relationship is sensitive to the changing competitive environment over the industry s history which suggests that innovation policy must focus not only on firm attributes but also competitive structures

science and the diffusion of knowledge abstract scientists social scientists and politicians frequently credit basic science with stimulating technological innovation and with it economic growth despite a substantial body of research investigating this general relationship relatively little empirical attention has been given to understanding the mechanisms that might generate this linkage this paper considers whether more rapid diffusion of knowledge brought about by the norm of publication might account for part of this effect we identify the importance of publication by comparing the patterns of citations from future patents to three groups of focal patents i those that reference scientific peer reviewed publications ii those that reference commercial non scientific publications and iii those that reference neither our analyses strongly implicate publication as an important mechanism for accelerating the rate of technological innovation patents that reference published material whether peer reviewed or not receive more citations primarily because their influence diffuses faster in time and space

money and interest in a cash in advance economy the authors analyze an aggregative general equilibrium model in which the use of money is motivated by a cash in advance constraint applied to purchases of a subset of consumption goods the system is subject to both real and monetary shocks which are economy wide and observed by all they develop methods for verifying the existence of characterizing and explicitly calculating equilibria copyright 1987 by the econometric society

patents and patent policy a patent is the legal right of an inventor to exclude others from making or using a particular invention this right is sometimes termed an intellectual property right and is viewed as an incentive for innovation this article surveys the evidence on patent effectiveness in encouraging innovation and reviews the current controversies in patent policy

university patenting and its effects on academic research the emerging european evidence this paper surveys the existing fragmentary data on the growth of university owned patents and university invented patents in europe we find evidence that university patenting is growing but this phenomenon remains heterogeneous across countries and disciplines we found some evidence that university licensing is not profitable for most universities although some do succeed in attracting substantial additional revenues this might be due to the fact that patents and publications tend to go hand in hand in a dynamic setting however we fear that the increase in university patenting exacerbates differences across universities in terms of financial resources and research outcome

does government funding complement or substitute private research funding to universities abstract there is growing political pressure on universities to intensify their interaction with industry and to enlarge their own research funding options in a context characterised by increasing constraints on public spending however whether the successful achievement of such a political desired outcome is consistent with a restriction of government funding is not clear and requires further investigation as a matter of fact there is scant empirical evidence on whether and to what extent government funding affects the external funding options available to universities in particular those related to research and consulting activities by using a set of probit and tobit panel data models estimated on financial data for the whole population of italian university departments engaged in research in the engineering and physical sciences this paper provides evidence that government funding to universities complements funding from research contracts and consulting contributing to increasing universities collaboration with industry and activating knowledge transfer processes

changes to university ipr regulations in europe and the impact on academic patenting this article develops a general framework to describe the changes in university ipr regulations in europe and their effects on the patenting activities of universities and on knowledge transfer processes understanding the effects of changes in ipr regulations on academic patenting is a complex issue and parallels with the us case can be misleading first despite the general trend towards institutional ownership university ipr regulations in europe remain extremely differentiated and there is no one to one mapping to the us system second it is difficult to disentangle the quantitative and qualitative effects of changes in ipr ownership regulations on academic patenting activities from the effects of concurrent transformations in the institutional cultural and organizational landscape surrounding academic knowledge transfer the article proposes a review and typological classification of national university ipr ownership systems on the basis of their development since 2000 and uses it to analyze the aggregate dynamics of academic patent ownership in several european countries the analysis of patterns of ownership of academic patents shows that there has been a general increase in university patenting since 1990 with a significant slowdown and even reduction in some countries after early 2000s accompanied by a switch in academic patents ownership in favor of university ownership though preserving the european specificity of high company ownership of academic invented patents

institutional determinants of university spin off quantity and quality a longitudinal multilevel cross country study the creation of spin off firms from universities is seen as an important mechanism for the commercialization of research and hence the overall contribution from universities to technological development and economic growth governments and universities are seeking to develop framework conditions that are conductive to spin off creation the most prevalent of such initiatives are legislative changes at national level and the establishment of technology transfer offices at university level the effectiveness of such initiatives is debated but empirical evidence is limited in this paper we analyze the full population of universities in italy norway and the uk three countries adopting differing approaches to framework conditions to test whether national and university level initiatives have an influence on the number of spin offs created and the quality of these spin offs building on institutional theory and using multilevel analysis we find that changes in the institutional framework conditions at both national and university levels are conductive to the creation of more spin offs but that the increase in quantity is at the expense of the quality of these firms hence the effect of such top down changes in framework conditions on the economic impact from universities seems to be more symbolic than substantive

does the new economy measure up to the great inventions of the past abstract during the four years 1995 99 u s productivity growth experienced a strong revival and achieved growth rates exceeding that of the golden age of 1913 72 accordingly many observers have declared the new economy to be an industrial revolution even more important than the second industrial revolution of 1860 1900 which made the golden age of productivity growth possible this paper dissects the recent productivity revival subtracts out a cyclical component and concludes that there is no revival of the productivity growth trend in the 88 percent of the private economy lying outside of the durables manufacturing sector the paper explains this surprising finding by pointing to limitations in computers and the internet in comparison with the great inventions of the past

a mechanism to induce ramsey pricing for natural monopoly firms this paper considers a model with m independent natural monopoly firms it then proposes a taxation subsidy scheme that the regulator can implement to induce the m price setting firms acting independently to jointly adopt ramsey pricing the scheme has the following desirable features 1 the regulator needs only book keeping data on quantities prices and profits 2 the scheme induces cost minimization behaviour 3 the firms will not behave strategically 4 at each step of the convergence process to optimum each firm earns a non negative return and welfare is improved

a penny for your quotes patent citations and the value of innovations the use ofpatents in economic research has been seriously hindered by the fact that patents vary enormously in their importance or value and hence simple patent counts cannot be informative about innovative output the purpose of this article is to put forward patent counts weighted by citations as indicators of the value of innovations thereby overcoming the limitations of simple counts the empirical analysis of a particular innovation computed tomography scanners indeed shows a close association between citation based patent indices and independent measures of the social value of innovations in that field moreover the weighting scheme appears to be nonlinear increasing in the number of citations implying that the informational content of citations rises at the margin as in previous studies simple patent counts are found to be highly correlated with contemporaneous rd however here the association is within afield over time rather than cross sectional

evidence from patents and patent citations on the impact of nasa and other federal labs on commercial innovation federal lab commercialization is explored 1 by analyzing us government patents and 2 in a qualitative analysis of one nasa lab s patents tests apply to three distinct sets of patents 1963 94 nasa all other us government and a random sample of all us inventors patents the federal patenting rate plummeted in the 1970s consistent with increasing commercialization both nasa s and other federal agencies rates recovered in the 1980s the case study finds citations to be a valid but noisy measure of technology spillovers excluding spurious cites two thirds of cites to patents of nasa lewis electro physics branch were evaluated as involving spillovers

appropriating signs and meaning the elusive economics of trademark this paper deals with economic analysis of trademark its presence in markets is originally connected with the problem of information asymmetries and the need to provide information for assisting exchanges so as to avert the market failure brought about by adverse selection however this information conveying function is also accompanied by a differentiation effect arising from the power of persuasion that signs can exert on individuals the exploitation of differentiation has given rise to the practice of branding which ties markets and consumption to the realms of meaning and experience branding is so all pervasive in today s economy as to have somehow transfigured it so that the role of persuasion is now pre eminent nonetheless the mainstream economic theory tends to resist acknowledging this change which would to a large extent call into question well established hypotheses and theoretical tools the general response has therefore been to assume that the informational role of trademark predominates and to use this hypothesis to construct models welfare evaluations and policy prescriptions that bear little or no relation to the actual markets the opposing approach in the shadow of the nelson s and arrow s seminal papers on economics of information is recognising the idiosyncratic character of information and therefore drawing conclusions and devising solutions that while still based upon the welfare criterion also incorporate a wider awareness and a deeper representation of the scenario under study the present work attempts to move in this direction showing how different disciplines can provide some key epistemological tools for enabling economists to effectively evaluate the welfare outcomes of the introduction and progressive alteration of a particular intellectual property right within the realm of signs and meanings

learning from one another international policy emulation and university industry technology transfer cross border emulation of economic and technology policies among industrial economy governments has become common in recent years and spans policies ranging from intellectual property rights to collaborative r d recent initiatives by a number of industrial economy governments suggest considerable interest in emulating the bayh dole act of 1980 a piece of legislation that is widely credited with stimulating significant growth in university industry technology transfer and research collaboration in the united states i examine the effects of bayh dole on university industry collaboration and technology transfer in the united states emphasizing the lengthy history of both activities prior to 1980 and noting the extent to which these activities are rooted in the incentives created by the unusual scale and structure by comparison with western europe or japan of the us higher education system efforts at emulation of the bayh dole policy by other governments are likely to have modest success at best without greater attention to the underlying structural differences among the higher education systems of these nations copyright 2011 the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of associazione icc all rights reserved oxford university press

causality and the first industrial revolution the existence timing and possible causes of the british industrial revolution are considered by investigating the time series properties of industrial production and various explanatory variables utilizing co integration based causality tests this paper argues that domestic forces notably population real wages and technological progress shaped the industrial revolution whereas overseas trade expansion was a consequence of industrial growth the first industrial revolution may shed more general light on the forces promoting industrialization and growth to the extent that the first industrial revolution offers a template exports do not appear to provide a simple pathway to industrialization copyright 1998 by oxford university press

the new economy what the concept owes to the oecd abstract in the last two decades concepts have appeared that have influenced and even defined entire science and technology policies in western countries high technology national system of innovation information economy knowledge based economy and the new economy in all these policy developments the oecd acting as a think tank for its member countries has been an important promoter of the concepts turning them into buzzwords this article looks at the concept of the new economy as the culmination of decades of work on technology and productivity and explores the crucial role of the oecd in its dissemination and above all the role statistics have played in shaping science and innovation policies

universities and industrially relevant science towards measurement models and indicators of entrepreneurial orientation abstract which university departments engaged in industrially relevant science are likely candidates to become entrepreneurial at present there are neither measurement models nor leading indicators that can answer such questions at an international comparative level this paper introduces concepts theory and a measurement model for identifying the early stages of a university s enterpreneurial orientation within a quantitative analytical framework this approach focuses specifically on university industry interactions in which the connectivity between academic science and industrial research is captured and measured empirically in terms of 1 public private co authored research articles and 2 references citations within corporate research articles to university research articles the paper examines a range of country level and institutional determinants of industrially relevant science across 18 research areas of significant industrial interest and at two different levels of analysis research systems of oecd countries and large sets of research universities within those countries the results of these large scale analyses along with those of a case study dealing with european universities active in the field of immunology research suggest that many structural factors determine university industry interactions and the potential for entrepreneurial orientation the two connectivity indicators appear to be of minor significance compared to a university s country of location and the magnitude of its research activities in industrially relevant fields of science

encouraging university entrepreneurship the effect of the bayh dole act on university patenting in the united states abstract universities are seen as a source of technology development that is useful to entrepreneurial activity as a result policy makers often consider mechanisms to stimulate technology commercialization at research universities as a way to encourage entrepreneurial activity in a region however the transfer of technology from universities to the private sector requires the exploitation of markets for knowledge which are fraught with difficulty arrow k 1962 economic welfare and the allocation of resources for inventions in nelson r ed the rate and direction of inventive activity princeton nj princeton univ press this article examines the effect of one u s public policy initiative the bayh dole act in the united states on one aspect of technology commercialization university patenting specifically the article explores the university share of patents from 1969 through 1996 across 117 lines of business and shows that the effectiveness of licensing in a line of business is significantly correlated with university share of patents in the post bayh dole period but not in the pre bayh dole period these results suggest that the bayh dole act provided incentives for universities to increase patenting in those fields in which licensing is an effective mechanism for acquiring new technical knowledge the paper discusses the implications of this shift in patenting for research and public policy

wacky patents meet economic indicators we investigate whether standard indicators can distinguish between wacky patents and a control group forward citations are good predictors of importance however wacky patents have higher originality generality and citation lags suggesting that these indicators should be interpreted carefully

shirking sharing risk and shelving the role of university license contracts abstract in this paper we develop a theoretical model of university licensing to explain why university license contracts often include payment types that differ from the fixed fees and royalties typically examined by economists our findings suggest that milestone payments and annual payments are common because moral hazard risk sharing and adverse selection all play a role when embryonic inventions are licensed milestones address inventor moral hazard without the inefficiency inherent in royalties the potential for a licensee to shelve inventions is an adverse selection problem which can be addressed by annual fees if shelving is unintentional but may require an upfront fee if the firm licenses an invention with the intention to shelve it whether the licensing contract prevents shelving depends in part on the university credibly threatening to take the license back from a shelving firm this supports the rationale for bayh dole march in rights but also shows the need for the exercise of these rights can be obviated by contracts

changes in university patent quality after the bayh dole act a re examination abstract the bayh dole act of 1980 facilitated the retention by universities of patent rights resulting from government funded academic research thus encouraging university entry into patenting and licensing though the act is widely recognized to be a major change in federal policy towards academic research surprisingly little empirical analysis has been directed at assessing its impacts on the academy and on university industry research relationships an important exception is the work of henderson et al rev econ stat 80 1998 119 127 which examined the impact of bayh dole on the quality of university patents as measured by the number of times they are cited in subsequent patents the authors found that the quality of academic patents declined dramatically after bayh dole a finding that has potentially important policy implications in this paper we revisit this influential finding by using a longer stream of patent citations data we show that the results of the henderson et al study reflect changes in the intertemporal distribution of citations to university patents rather than a significant change in the total number of citations these patents eventually receive this has important implications not only for the evaluation of bayh dole but also for future research using patent citations as economic indicators

the changing composition of innovative activity in the us a portrait based on patent analysis abstract in this paper patent bibliometrics are used to investigate shifts underway in the american innovation system patent indicators point to extraordinarily dynamic innovation in information and health technologies accompanied by a shift in the center of us innovation from the east to the west coast innovating companies are adapting to the demise of large corporate basic research laboratories by using their own research instead growth in university patenting is also striking and universities have become dominant patentees in a few large economically vibrant cities the importance of universities to local innovation has also been revealed by the growth in referencing from patents to papers which allows us to see that companies preferentially reference papers from in state public sector institutions