This article investigates patent protection for a long sequence of innovations where firms repeatedly supersede each … using a patentability requirement--a minimum innovation size required for patents. A patentability requirement can stimulate … to innovation …

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, all countries having patent systems required patentable inventions to be … nonobvious. The nonobviousness requirement is considered to be so central to patent policy that it has frequently been called the … more unabashedly normative component, which might facilitate innovation and progress in law …

This study was initiated in order to provide more factual insight into the recent debates on patent reforms in general … and more particularly, the practice of patent continuations in the United States Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO … components of the flow of patent applications to the USPTO was carried out and insight into the ever-increasing propensity of …

innovation. While previous studies have often considered patents and trade secrets as substitutes for one another, we investigate … the complementary role of the two protection methods. We identify protection strategies for single innovation firms and … for the same innovation or for different innovations. Employing firm panel data from Germany, we find fairly few …

We investigate the causal effect of patent rights on cumulative innovation, using large-scale data that approximate the … patent universe in its technological and economic variety. We introduce a novel instrumental variable for patent invalidation … that exploits personnel scarcity in post-grant opposition at the European Patent Office. We find that patent invalidation …

We investigate the causal effect of patent rights on cumulative innovation, using large-scale data that approximate the … patent universe in its technological and economic variety. We introduce a novel instrumental variable for patent invalidation … that exploits personnel scarcity in post-grant opposition at the European Patent Office. We find that patent invalidation …

Open innovation is the subject of increased scholarly debate. A lot of attention has thereby been paid to firm …-centered open innovation, characterized by a for-profit motive and the interplay between patents and contracts, resulting in … communities the present paper examines how the law can assist in establishing a new approach to open innovation (‘new' open …

. Where licensing fails, follow-on innovation is blocked unless firms gain FTO through patent invalidation. Using large …We study the blocking effect of patents on follow-on innovation by others. We posit that follow-on innovation requires … freedom to operate (FTO), which firms typically obtain through a license from the patentee holding the original innovation …

Using comprehensive microdata based on the Chinese Patent Survey, we examine the appropriation strategies that firms …