intellectual property

This WIPO report provides an introduction and broad overview of copyright definitions, legislation and enforcement mechanisms for smaller businesses, start-up, researchers and entrepreneurs.

The authors investigate the impact of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection on economic growth in a panel of 79 countries using threshold regression analysis. We show that whilst the effect of IPR protection on growth depends upon the level of development, it is positively and significantly related to growth for low- and high-income countries, but not for middle-income countries.

This paper explores the impact of patenting on university professors’ scientific productivity, as measured by publication and citation counts. It concludes that academic inventors (university professors who appear as designated inventors on at least one patent application) publish more and better quality papers than their colleagues with no patents, and increase their productivity after patenting.

This paper provides a systematic database on university patenting activities in Sweden. The rate of patenting activity showed a positive trend between the years 1990 and 2004.

This paper analyses several issues that arise when measuring technological specialisation with patent data. Three starting choices are required regarding the data source, the statistical measure and the sectoral aggregation level. The authors show that the measure is highly sensitive to the data source and to the level of sectoral aggregation.

This paper compares corporate and academic patents in order to test whether the sectors apply for patents with similar values and similar determinants of value. The determinants of patent value are mainly related to the identification of institutional sources of knowledge.

The objective of this paper is to analyse the determinants of 87 European universities’ patenting activities. The findings reveal that size of universities and the presence of disciplines (medicine and engineering) are positively associated with the size of the patent portfolio. There is no significant relationship between the R&D intensity of the regional business environment and the amount of patent activity while scientific capabilities do coincide with higher levels of patent activity.

The focus in this paper is on knowledge spillovers between high-technology firms in Europe, as captured by patent citations. The European coverage is given by patent applications at the European Patent Office that are assigned to high-technology firms located in the EU-25 member states, the two accession countries Bulgaria and Romania, and Norway and Switzerland.

Patenting new products in pharmaceuticals industry is of greater importance than in the other high technology branches of industry nowadays, according to the authors. The paper reviews the TRIPS agreement and explores patent protection in the global economy.

This paper examines how the framework of path-dependency and technological trajectories can be applied to explain the observed distribution of patent values as it is revealed in the distribution of patent citations.