We investigate the scientific productivity of Italian academic inventors, namely academic researchers designated as inventors on patent applications to the European Patent Office, 1978-1999. We use a novel longitudinal data set comprising 299 academic inventors, and we match them with an equal...

We define international technological specialisation (ITS) as the technological performance of a country in a specific technology relative to its overall international technological performance. This paper uses patent applications and patent citations at the European Patent Office for five...

The paper compares the value and impact of academic patents in five European countries with different institutional frameworks : Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden. An academic patent is defined as such when at least one university professor appears among its inventors,...

We analyze the relative effects of national and international, intrasectoral and intersectoral R&D spillovers on innovative activity in six large, industrialized countries over the period 1980–2000. We use patent applications at the European Patent Office to measure innovation and their...

Authorship and inventorship are “attribution rights” upon which individual scientists build their reputation and career. Social and legal norms concerning their distribution within research teams are currently criticized for failing to inform third parties on individual contributions. We...

The present note contains an explorative and introductory analysis of the patenting activity exhibited by the top 100 companies of the IRI Scoreboard, and intends to identify strengths and weaknesses for its possible future extension to the whole Scoreboard. With respect to these companies,...

Protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) serves a dual role in economic development. While it promotes innovation by providing legal protection of inventions, it may retard catch-up and learning by restricting the diffusion of innovations. Does stronger IPR protection in a developing...

This paper estimates the process of diffusion and decay of knowledge from university, public laboratories and corporate patents in six countries and tests the differences across countries and across technological fields using data from the European Patent Office. It finds that university and...