Innovation and its discontents Jaffe, Adam B; Jaffe, Adam B; Lerner, Josh
2008., 20110527, 2011, 2004, 2005-01-01, 20040101
eBook
The United States patent system has become sand rather than lubricant in the wheels of American progress. Such is the premise behind this provocative and timely book by two of the nation's leading ...experts on patents and economic innovation.
•Patented inventions vary widely in their relative quality, however this is defined.•A framework for comparing patent-quality-related outcomes is presented.•Common outcomes, such as forward citation ...counts or patent lifetime, are very inconsistent in their assessment of what constitutes a ’high-quality’ patent.•The relationships between these outcomes and patent characteristics defined at grant are extremely variable across outcomes and technology types.•Neither measurement of patent quality, nor policy responses to a proliferation of poor-quality patents, are likely to be sensibly addressed by a one-size-fits-all approach.
The quality of novel technological innovations is extremely variable, and the ability to measure innovation quality is essential to sensible, evidence-based policy. Patents, an often vital precursor to a commercialised innovation, share this heterogeneous quality distribution. A pertinent question then arises: How should we define and measure patent quality? Accepting that different parties have different views of, and different sets of terminologies for discussing this concept, we take a multi-dimensional view of patent quality in this work. We first test the consistency of popular post-grant outcomes that are often used as patent quality measures. Finding these measures to be generally inconsistent, we then use a raft of patent indicators available at the time of grant to dissect the characteristics of different post-grant outcomes. We find broad disagreement in the relative importance of individual characteristics between outcomes and, further, significant variation of the same across technologies within outcomes. We conclude that measurement of patent quality is highly sensitive to both the observable outcome selected and the technology type. Our findings bear concrete implications for scholarly research using patent data and policy discussions about patent quality.
► We provide a new patent indicator: the worldwide count of priority filings. ► Comprehensive measure of patenting that is the source of all existing patent series. ► The indicator better reflects ...innovative performance of developing economies. ► The indicator eliminates the home bias that affects existing patent indicators. ► The methodological contribution involves recovering missing data from family link.
This paper describes a new patent-based indicator of inventive activity. The indicator is based on counting all the priority patent applications filed by a country's inventors, regardless of the patent office in which the application is filed, and can therefore be considered as a complete ‘matrix’ of all patent counts. The method has the advantage of covering more inventions than the selective Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) or triadic families counts, while at the same time limiting the home-country bias of single-country-based indicators (inventors from a particular country tend to file in their own country). The indicator is particularly useful to identify emerging technologies and to assess the innovation performance of developing economies.
•IoT-driven digitization has agile innovation.•The catch-up of Asian countries is becoming stagnated.•The U.S. is becoming resurrected.•The network effect is important in IoT-driven digitization.
The ...purpose of this paper is to understand changes in the technological competitiveness of countries induced by Internet of Things (IoT)-driven digitization. Patent analysis, as one of the best ways to measure technological competitiveness, exhibits three characteristics of IoT-driven digitization, namely, agile innovation, stagnation across Asian countries, and the resurgence of the U.S., in turn taking advantage of network effects. The agile innovation of IoT-driven digitization suggests that digitization relies less on existing technologies and enables the leveraging of opportunities that arise from new order emergence. Some Asian countries took advantage of agile innovation as a window of opportunity in the previous age of digitization. These countries now lag less behind the U.S. as a result. Nevertheless, as these countries experience difficulties in taking advantage of agile innovation in the current age of digitization, they lag further behind the U.S. in terms of IoT-driven digitization. The structure of joint patent applications reveals that the U.S. has become a hub between the two European communities, the Chinese community and individual pro-American countries, implying that the network effect of IoT-driven digitization could have a significant impact on the technological competitiveness of countries.
What is the optimal system of intellectual property rights to encourage innovation? Empirical evidence from economic history can help to inform important policy questions that have been difficult to ...answer with modern data: For example, does the existence of strong patent laws encourage innovation? What proportion of innovations is patented? Is this share constant across industries and over time? How does patenting affect the diffusion of knowledge? How effective are prominent mechanisms, such as patent pools and compulsory licensing, that have been proposed to address problems with the patent system? This essay summarizes results of existing research and highlights promising areas for future research. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Abstract
The presence of a patent foramen ovale (PFO) is implicated in the pathogenesis of a number of medical conditions; however, the subject remains controversial and no official statements have ...been published. This interdisciplinary paper, prepared with involvement of eight European scientific societies, aims to review the available trial evidence and to define the principles needed to guide decision making in patients with PFO. In order to guarantee a strict process, position statements were developed with the use of a modified grading of recommendations assessment, development, and evaluation (GRADE) methodology. A critical qualitative and quantitative evaluation of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures was performed, including assessment of the risk/benefit ratio. The level of evidence and the strength of the position statements of particular management options were weighed and graded according to predefined scales. Despite being based often on limited and non-randomised data, while waiting for more conclusive evidence, it was possible to conclude on a number of position statements regarding a rational general approach to PFO management and to specific considerations regarding left circulation thromboembolism. For some therapeutic aspects, it was possible to express stricter position statements based on randomised trials. This position paper provides the first largely shared, interdisciplinary approach for a rational PFO management based on the best available evidence.
In this study, closure of a patent foramen ovale versus medical therapy alone after cryptogenic stroke was not effective in preventing recurrent stroke. Secondary analyses suggested a possible ...benefit, but the study did not permit a definitive conclusion.
It is unknown whether closure of a patent foramen ovale is effective in the prevention of recurrent stroke after a cryptogenic ischemic stroke. Observational studies and meta-analyses have suggested that closure is associated with a benefit; however, a randomized trial, Evaluation of the STARFlex Septal Closure System in Patients with a Stroke and/or Transient Ischemic Attack due to Presumed Paradoxical Embolism through a Patent Foramen Ovale (CLOSURE I), failed to show the superiority of closure over medical therapy alone.
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In observational studies, the Amplatzer PFO Occluder has been shown to have advantageous safety features as a closure device.
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The size of patent applications has doubled over the past two decades, resulting in a dramatic surge in the workload of patent offices all over the world and serious concerns over patent quality ...standards. The current paper investigates the sources of this inflation in claims and pages for EPO applications. Four hypotheses are quantitatively examined: the diffusion of national drafting practices, the complexity of research activities, the emergence of new sectors, and filing strategies. The results validate the four hypotheses. They reveal major differences across countries in patent drafting styles, especially between Civil and Common Law countries, the latter being characterized by much larger patents. Second, the success of the PCT route is leading to the harmonizing of drafting styles worldwide on the US model. This paper therefore challenges the commonly accepted idea that more claims reflect a broader scope of protection by showing that the size of patents is partly due to institutional changes in the system.
Patent monetisation is an important source of revenues worldwide. This activity is increasingly carried out by patent assertion entities (PAE), which are at the origin of about 40% of infringement ...actions filed in the United States. This paper uses an original database of US patents reporting PAE patent acquisitions. We document two key empirical facts about the presence of PAEs in the market for patents. First, PAEs build large patent portfolios and contribute significantly to patent transfers in the US. Second, their impact on follow-on innovation is, on average, negative. With a series of dynamic diff-in-diffs analyses, we estimate a significant post-transfer drop in forward citations received by patents acquired by PAEs. This drop is not immediate but takes some years to materialise. Heterogeneity tests show that our results are driven by acquisitions of old and highly cited patents, as well as by patent acquisitions by large patent aggregators.
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