142 research outputs found
The vulnerability of patent value determinants
No full textThis paper presents a critical survey of the literature on the determinants of patent value. The contributions to the literature are essentially two-fold. First, significant inconsistencies across existing studies are underlined. Second, a sensitivity analysis shows strong dependencies of several ‘classical’ results on two main empirical dimensions, namely the choice of the dependent variables (indicator of patent value) and the sampling methodology. The new indicators of filing strategies put forward by van Zeebroeck and van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie (this journal) turn out to be the most robust and stable determinants.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe
The vulnerability of patent value determinants
No full textThis paper presents a critical survey of the literature on the determinants of patent value. The contributions to the literature are essentially two-fold. First, significant inconsistencies across existing studies are underlined. Second, a sensitivity analysis shows strong dependencies of several ‘classical’ results on two main empirical dimensions, namely the choice of the dependent variables (indicator of patent value) and the sampling methodology. The new indicators of filing strategies put forward by van Zeebroeck and van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie (this journal) turn out to be the most robust and stable determinants.
Essays on the Adoption and Diffusion of Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence Technology
No full textEssays on the Adoption and Diffusion of Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence TechnologyThe motivation behind this thesis lies around developing the academic literature, on one hand, on the impact of a specific technology on an organization’s strategy, as well as, on the other hand, on the characteristics and components driving and inhibiting the adoption and diffusion of a specific technology inside an organization.By investigating the drivers and challenges of adopting and diffusing Artificial Intelligence (AI) in an organization, this research aims to answer to the following research question: “What are the main complements and antecedents to the adoption and diffusion of Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence technology, at an organizational level?”.To answer that question, we must first understand how the established models of rank, order, stock and epidemic effects influence the adoption of AI technology. Different streams of works have highlighted four main groups of factors affecting the diffusion of new technologies within or across firms: rank, order, stock and epidemic effects. This thesis examines how these factors influence both the adoption and diffusion of Artificial Intelligence technology across and within firms.Second, this thesis extends the established models to incorporate the effects of uncertainty and competitive intensity on the adoption behaviors of AI technologies among firms. We investigate how uncertainty and competitive intensity affect the adoption behaviours of AI technology among firms.Third, this thesis investigates how technological and managerial complementarities influence the adoption and diffusion of AI technology. To this aim, we extend the established models to incorporate effects of technological and managerial complementarities in the adoption and diffusion of Artificial Intelligence technology among firms. We investigate how technological and managerial complementarities help in facilitating inter-firm diffusion, in driving intra-firm diffusion and in reducing the barriers to AI technology adoption.Fourth, this thesis investigates the discrepancies in adoption and use of AI technology between SMEs and large organizations. To this aim, we explore the determinants and patterns of inter- and intra-firm diffusion at both SMEs and large organization levels.A first finding of this thesis highlights the influence of industry-level adoption on a focal firm’s own adoption. This thesis points at the presence of herding behaviors by which firms tend to follow the crowd. As the share of adopters in the industry increases, the crowd gets bigger and provides a more compelling reason to adopt. However, as our results suggest, these herding behaviors are fragile, exacerbated by competitive forces, and counterbalanced by certain sources of uncertainty while strengthened by others. A second finding of this thesis highlights the importance of pre-existing digital capabilities in the adoption of AI technology. The adoption of AI requires a high degree of maturity and a significant stock of complementary digital technology. This is most likely due to the cumulative nature of AI technology that heavily relies on the information and process infrastructure of the firm. But this implies that leapfrogging on the technology is very unlikely with AI, encouraging firms to build the right foundations (in terms of infrastructure, systems, processes and skills) early on.Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe
Essays on the empirical analysis of patent systems
Full text link1. The context: The European patent system has been affected by substantial changes over the past three decades, which have raised vigorous debates at different levels. The main objective of the present dissertation is to contribute to these debates through an exploratory analysis of different changes in patenting practices – in particular the way applications are drafted and filed to patent offices –, their drivers, association with the value of patents, and potential impact on the patent system. The coming essays are therefore empirical in their essence, but are inspired by economic motivations and concerns. Their originality is threefold: it resides in the novelty of the main questions discussed, the comprehensive database specifically built to address them, and the range of statistical methods used for this purpose. The main argument throughout these pages is that patenting practices have significantly evolved in the past decades and that these developments have affected the patent system and could compromise its ability to fulfil its economic purpose. The economic objective of patents is to encourage innovation and its diffusion through the public disclosure of the inventions made. But their exploitation in the knowledge economy has assumed so many different forms that inventors have supposedly developed new patenting and filing strategies to deal with these market conditions or reap the maximum benefits from their patents. The present thesis aims at better understanding the dimensions, determinants, and some potential consequences of these developing practices.<p><p>2. The evolution: Chapter 2 presents a detailed descriptive analysis of the evolution in the size of patent applications filed to the European Patent Office (EPO). In this chapter, we propose two measures of patent voluminosity and identify the main patterns in their evolution. Based on a dataset with about 2 million documents filed at the EPO, the results show that the average voluminosity of patent applications – measured in terms of the number of pages and claims contained in each document – has doubled over the past 25 years. Nevertheless, this evolution varies widely across countries, technologies and filing procedures chosen by the applicant. This increasing voluminosity of filings has a strong impact on the workload of the EPO, which justifies the need for regulatory and policy actions.<p><p>3. The drivers: The evolution in patent voluminosity observed in chapter 2 calls for a multivariate analysis of its determinants. Chapter 3 therefore proposes and tests 4 different hypotheses that may contribute to explaining the observed inflation in size: the influence of national laws and practices and their diffusion to other countries with the progressive globalization of patenting procedures, the complexification of research activities and inventions, the emergence of new sectors with less established norms and vocabularies, and the construction of patent portfolios. The econometric results first reveal that the four hypotheses are significantly associated with longer documents and are therefore empirically supported. It appears however that the first hypothesis – the diffusion of national drafting practices through international patenting procedures – is the strongest contributor of all, resulting in a progressive harmonization of drafting styles toward American standards, which are longer by nature. The portfolio construction hypothesis seems a less important driver but nevertheless highlights substantial changes in patenting practices. These results raise two questions: Do these evolving patenting practices indicate more valuable patents? Do they induce any embarrassment for the patent system?<p><p>4. Measuring patent value: If the former of these two questions is to be addressed, measures are needed to identify higher value patents. Chapter 4 therefore proposes a review of the state of the art on patent value indicators and analyses several issues in their measurement and interpretation. Five classes of indicators proposed in the literature may be obtained directly from patent databases: the number of countries in which each patent is enforced, the number of years during which each patent has been renewed, the grant decision taken, the number of citations received from subsequent patents, and whether it has been opposed by a third party before the EPO. Because the former two measures are closely connected (the geographical scope of protection and length of maintenance can hardly be observed independently), they have been subjected to closer scrutiny in the first section of chapter 4, which shows that these two dimensions have experienced opposite evolutions. A composite measure – the Scope-Year Index – reveals that the overall trend is oriented downwards, which may suggest a substantial decline in the average value of patents. The second section of chapter 4 returns to the five initial classes of measures and underlines their main patterns. It appears that most of them witness the well-known properties of patent value: a severe skewness and large country and technology variations. A closer look at their relationships, however, reveals a high degree of orthogonality between them and opposite trends in their evolution, suggesting that they actually capture different dimensions of a patent’s value and therefore do not always pinpoint the same patents as being the most valuable. This result strongly discourages the reliance on one of the available indicators only and opens some avenue for the creation of one potential composite index of value based upon the five indicators to maximize the chances of capturing all potentially valuable patents in a large database. The proposed index reflects the intensity of the signal provided by all 5 constituting indicators on the potential value of each patent. Its declining trend reflects a rarefaction of this signal on average, leading to different plausible interpretations.<p><p>5. The links with patent value: Based upon the six indicators of value proposed in chapter 4 (the five classical ones plus the composite), the question of the association between filing strategies and the value of patents may be analysed. This question is empirically addressed in chapter 5, which focuses on all EPO patents filed between 1990 and 1995. The first section presents a comprehensive review of the existing evidence on the determinants of patent value. The numerous contributions in the field differ widely along three dimensions (the indicator of value chosen as dependent variable, the sampling methodology, and the set of variables tested as determinants), which have translated into many ambiguities across the literature. Section 2 proposes measures to identify different dimensions of filing strategies, which are essentially twofold: they relate to the routes followed by patent filings toward the EPO (PCT, accelerated processing), and to their form (excess claims, share of claims lost in examination), and construction (by assembly or disassembly, divisional). These measures are then included into an econometric model based upon the framework provided by the literature. The proposed model, which integrates the set of filing strategy variables along with some of the classical determinants, is regressed on the six available indicators separately over the full sample. In addition, the sensitivity of the available results to the indicator and the sampling methodology is assessed through 18 geographic and 14 industrial clustered regressions and about 30 regressions over random samples for each indicator. The estimates are then compared across countries, industries and indicators. These results first reveal that filing strategies are indicative of more valuable patents and provide the most stable determinants of all. And third, the results do confirm some classical determinants in their positive association with patent value, but highlight a high degree of sensitivity of most of them to the indicator or the sample chosen for the analysis, requiring much care in generalizing such empirical results.<p><p>6. The links with patent length: Chapter 6 focuses on one particular dimension of patent value: the length of patents. To do so, the censored nature of the dependent variable (the time elapsed between the filing of a patent application and its ultimate fall into the public domain) dictates the recourse to a survival time model as proposed by Cox (1972). The analysis is original in three main respects. First of all, despite the fact that renewal data have been exploited for about two decades to obtain estimates of patent value (Pakes and Schankerman, 1984), this chapter provides – to the best of our knowledge – the first comprehensive analysis of the determinants of patent length. Second, whereas most of the empirical literature in the field focuses on granted patents and investigates their maintenance, the analysis reported here includes all patent applications. This comprehensive approach is dictated by the provisional rights provided by pending applications to their holders and by the legal uncertainty these represent for competitors. And third, the model integrates a wide set of explanatory variables, starting with the filing strategy variables proposed in chapter 5. The main results are threefold: first, they clearly show that patent rights have significantly increased in length over the past decades despite a small apparent decline in the average grant rate, but largely due to the expansion of the examination process. Second, they indicate that most filing strategies induce considerable delays in the examination process, possibly to the benefit of the patentee, but most certainly to the expense of legal uncertainty on the markets. And third, they confirm that more valuable patents (more cited or covering a larger geographical scope) take more time to process, and live longer, whereas more complex applications are associated with longer decision lags, but also with lower grant and renewal rates.<p><p>7. Conclusions: The potential economic consequences and some policy implications of the findings from the dissertation are discussed in chapter 7. The evolution of patenting practices analysed in these works has some direct consequences for the stakeholders of the patent system. For the EPO, they generate a considerable increase in workload, resulting in growing backlogs and processing lags. For innovative firms, this phenomenon translates into an undesired increase in legal uncertainty, for it complicates the assessment of the limits to each party’s rights and hence of the freedom to operate on a market, which is precisely what the so-called ‘patent trolls’ and ‘submariners’ may be looking for. Although empirical evidence is lacking, some fear that this may result in underinvestment in research, development or commercialization activities (e.g. Hall and Harhoff, 2004). In addition, legal uncertainty is synonymous with an increased risk of litigation, which may hamper the development of SMEs and reduce the level of entrepreneurship. Finally, for society, we are left with a contrasted picture, which is hard to interpret. The European patent system wishes to maintain high quality standards to reduce business uncertainty around granted patents, but it is overloaded with the volume of applications filed, resulting in growing backglogs which translate into legal uncertainty surrounding pending applications. The filing strategies that contribute to this situation might reflect a legitimate need for more time and flexibility in filing more valuable patents, but they could also easily turn into real abuses of the system, allowing some patentees to obtain and artificially maintain provisional rights conferred by pending applications on inventions that might not meet the patentability requirements. Distinguishing between these two cases goes beyond the scope of the present dissertation, but should they be found abusive, they should be fought for they consume resources and generate uncertainty. And if legitimate, then they should be understood and the system adapted accordingly (e.g. by adjusting fees to discourage some strategies, raising the inventive step, fine-tuning the statutory term in certain technologies, providing more legal tools for patent examiners to reject unpatentable applications, etc.) so as to better serve the need of inventors for legal protection in a more efficient way, and to adapt the patent system to the challenges it is or will be facing.Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe
The puzzle of patent value indicators
Full text linkGiven the growing size of patent databases and portfolios, scholars and practitioners alike need metrics to help them in weighting patent counts or in ranking patents to focus on the most important ones. The main objective of this paper is to help them in this task with a practical and replicable approach. The discriminating criterion chosen is the potential market for the patented invention and the approach uses five different patent features (forward citations, grant decisions, families, renewals, and oppositions) that (1) have been found positively correlated with the value of patents in the literature, (2) can be extracted from patent databases, and (3) could inform on the existence of a potential market for the invention. The paper therefore discusses the main methodological issues in measuring and interpreting these metrics over a large international dataset and proposes one approach to extract from the different measures a consistent score that can be used to weight or rank patents.patent value, families, renewals, oppositions, citations, grant rate,
Essays on Digitalization and Sustainability: An Empirical Investigation of Firms’ Adoption of Digital Technologies and Environmental Management Practices
No full textThis thesis investigates the strategic digital transformation of organizations in the broader context of sustainability imperatives. Concretely, it focuses on the following questions: How are digital technologies such as platforms, artificial intelligence, and Internet of Things adopted today? What are the managerial complements needed to derive sustainable value from such technologies, and how are those adopted themselves? Finally, how do digital transformation and sustainability intersect with each other and how can organizations strategically integrate both? Relying on quantitative and qualitative data, this thesis brings empirical and theoretical contributions to both practice and research. Regarding the empirical findings, it documents the adoption of digital technologies and managerial practices, identifying the determinants of their profusion and highlighting, for example, the role played by firms’ size. Furthermore, it shows heterogeneity in the joint presence of digital technologies and specific managerial practices, notably those related to environmental innovation. Building upon these empirical findings and conceptual efforts, this thesis also presents theoretical propositions on the interlinkage between digital transformation, corporate strategy and sustainability. Concretely, it advances organizational and managerial complements needed to derive value from digital technologies today and also suggests an heterogeneous role of such technologies in sustainability transformation.Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe
Essays on patent litigation
No full textThis thesis comprises three chapters with the patent litigation as a central theme. The first chapter develops a methodology to compare the quality of patent litigation systems in six major economies: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Korea, China. Quality is defined as whether it provides a fair and just legal environment for nullifying weak patents and adjudicating infringement actions. Ultimately, this study presents heterogeneity in the quality of the sample systems. Litigation systems with rigorous and predictable adjudication have a low risk of opportunistic and anti-competitive filings.In the second paper (Chapter 2), I explore the relationship between technology ownership frag- mentation and the opposition filing in European Patent Office (EPO). I develop a two-stages game, in which opposition can be used for an ex ante negotiation (e.g. licensing). The framework presents that high litigation risk happens under two kinds of conditions: when the ownership to external technologies is highly concentrated, profit dissipation is over the licensing revenue for the potential licensee; when the ownership to external technologies is widely fragmented, transaction cost is high for the entrance. That is, the opposition, replacing the licensing, will be frequently used. To empirically test this hypothesis, we use a data set that covers patent opposition cases during the period 1985-2005, and construct application-based “fragmentation index”. Finally, regression results confirm that opposition likelihood displays an U-shape re- lationship with the number of potential technology suppliers. Besides, the effect of ownership patterns is stronger in discrete product industries. This analysis controls for differences in filing, granted rate and other technological observed characteristics. Results are robust to alternative estimation strategies that account for over-dispersion in the patent counts data and industry heterogeneity.The third paper proposes that system designs influence the incidence of patent litigation risk. I construct three one-to-one matching data sets by total 2748 European patents, which includes 916 patents without any challenge, 916 patents having been challenged in the opposition at the European Patent Office (EPO), and 916 having been challenged in Germany Federal Patent Court (BPatG). the EPO and the BPatG follow different procedures to reexamine, amend or revoke a granted decision. To explore different filing patterns in two litigation systems, I provide a much more rigorous definition to describe patent quality: Novelty, Unique, Impact, which has been operationalized and utilized in the technological radicalness literature. By comparing litigated cases to control groups, I find a high degree of significance between opposition risk and ex ante-identifiable factors - Novelty, while a high degree of significance between invalidation trials and ex post indicator of technological radicalness - Impact. Moreover, I also confirm that the filing in the opposition is less constrained with firm’s patent portfolios and technological conditions.Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestioninfo:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe
LinkedIn Blog Post: Digital cluster bombs and market power
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Patents only live twice: a patent survival analysis in Europe
No full textThe length of patent rights is an issue of considerable importance in the design of patent systems, and its optimality has been intensively discussed in the literature. This dimension – taking the form of the number of years during which a given patent has been maintained – has been considered in the empirical literature as a direct indication of the private value of patents. But the lack of comprehensive data on both the renewal of patents and their characteristics has prevented so far any systematic analysis of the determinants of this duration. Relying on a comprehensive dataset including detailed information on all patent applications filed to the European Patent Office from 1980 to 2000 and on the renewal of those of them that were granted, this paper presents a survival time analysis of the determinants of patent length in Europe. The results are threefold: first, they clearly establish that patent rights have significantly increased in length over the past decades despite a small decline in the average grant rate, and due to the dilatation of the examination process and higher maintenance rates. Second, they show that some filing strategies induce considerable delays in the examination process, possibly to the benefits of the patentee, but most certainly to the expense of legal uncertainty on the markets and undue exploitation of the provisional protection granted to pending applications by the European Patent Convention. And third, they confirm that more valuable patents (more cited or covering a larger geographical scope) take more time to be processed and live longer, whereas more complex applications are associated with longer decision lags but also with lower grant and renewal rates. These results have many policy implications for technology markets, patent systems and all their stakeholders.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe
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