New and advanced process technologies are growing in importance for highly industrialized countries which increasingly have to compete with rapidly-developing, low-cost, countries. Nanotechnology is an interesting example in this context. It may evolve into a platform for industrial renewal in a...

This work contributes to the definition and measurement of patent quality. It proposes a wide array of indicators capturing the technological and economic value of patented inventions, and the possible impact that these might have on subsequent technological developments. The measures proposed...

This work proposes a characterisation of the patenting behaviours of firms. It relies on patent data linked to firm data from a commercial dataset, regards firms of 20 or more employees located in 15 countries, and refers to the period 1999-2010. The way in which patent assignees’ names are...