Against the background of the so-called European paradox, i.e. the conjecture that EU countries lack the capability to transfer science into commercial innovations, knowledge transfer from academia to industry has been a central issue in policy debates recently. Based on a sample of German...

While often presumed in academic literature and policy discussions there is little empirical evidence showing that academic patents protect more basic inventions than corporate patents. This study provides new evidence on the basicness of academic patents using German professor patents linked to...

In recent years, firms have increasingly contributed to and been confronted with a patent landscape characterized by numerous but marginal inventions, overlapping claims and patent fences. Literature suggests that both the fragmentation of ownership and the threat of a firm's patent applications...

Established firms often face significant obstacles to innovation. As a solution, it has been suggested to form corporate ventures. Based on a sample of corporate and independent ventures in German manufacturing, we show that corporate ventures are more innovative than the control group, i.e. the...

Inventors often experience a low productivity after their company has been subject to a merger or acquisition (M&As). It is of central managerial interest to identify factors facilitating the integration of new inventive staff and thereby counteracting innovation declines after M&As. This paper...

Patent pendencies create uncertainty in research and development (R&D) collaboration agreements, resulting in a threat of expropriation of unprotected knowledge by potential partners, reduced bargaining power and enhanced search costs. In this paper, we show that - depending of the type of...

Inter-departmental innovation collaboration facilitates innovation performance. At the same time, it has been identified as source of increased coordination costs. Using organizational information processing theory, this paper builds and tests hypotheses on the costs and benefits of...

There is a growing literature that aims at assessing the private value of knowledge assets and patents. It has been shown that patents and their quality as measured by citations received by future patents contribute significantly to the market value of firms beyond their R&D stocks. This paper...

This study investigates whether standard patent measures for the importance and basicness of patents are able to distinguish between 'wacky' patents and a control group of randomly drawn patents. Our findings show that forward citations are good predictors of importance. However, the 'wacky'...

The not-invented-here (NIH) syndrome refers to internal resistance in a company against externally developed knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the occurrence of the NIH syndrome depends on the source of external knowledge and the success of the firm that aims at adapting external...