Among the most prominent theoretical frameworks dealing with the economic underlyings of firms' make-or-buy decisions are Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) and the Resourced Based View (RBV). Relying on panel data covering 107 European firms over eight years I test predictions from both TCE and...

There has been a wide-spread misconception based on the imprecise wording of Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) that the protection of business methods by patents is prohibited in Europe. This paper investigates the legal framework set by patent laws with respect to the...

Post-grant validity challenges at patent offices rely on the private initiative of third parties to correct mistakes made by patent offices. We hypothesize that incentives to bring post-grant validity challenges are reduced when many firms benefit from revocation of a patent and when firms are...

We link the hiring of R&D scientists from industry competitors to the subsequent formation of collaborative agreements, namely technology-oriented alliances. By transferring technological knowledge as well as cognitive elements to the hiring firm, mobile inventors foster the alignment of...

Markush structures are molecular skeletons containing not only specific atoms but also placeholders to represent broad sets of chemical (sub)structures. As genus claims, they allow a vast number of compounds to be claimed in a patent application without having to specify every single chemical...

The literature on organizational learning asserts that external learning is often limited geographically and technologically. We scrutinize to what extent organizations acquire external knowledge by accessing external knowledge repositories. We argue that professional service firms (PSFs) grant...

There has been a wide-spread misconception based on the imprecise wording of Art. 52 of the European Patent Convention (EPC) that the protection of business methods by patents is prohibited in Europe. This paper investigates the legal framework set by patent laws with respect to the...