Fabio Montobbio

The paper contributes to ongoing debate on the relationship between publishing and patenting in university. By applying event history analysis to patent and publication data for a sample of Italian academic scientists, we show that more productive scientists are more likely to become academic inventors, to no detriment of their orientation towards basic research. Research co-operation with industry is a

Both the sociology and the economics of science have dedicated many research efforts to explaining the determinants of academic scientists' careers and productivity. Most of the available evidence, however, is based upon US data, while cross-country studies are virtually ...

This paper estimates the international diusion and obsolescence of technological knowledge by technological eld and country using patent citations from the US Patent and Trademark Oce (USPTO) and from the European Patent Oce (EPO). We control for self-citations and for procedural and legal dierences between patent oces in the citation procedures using equivalent patents. We

Authorship and inventorship are the key attribution rights that contribute to a scientist's reputation and professional achievement. This article discusses the concepts of coinventorship and coauthorship in the legal and sociological literature, as well as journals' publication guidelines and technology transfer offices' recommendations. It discusses also the relative importance of social and legal norms in the allocation of scientific credit. This article revises critically the literature on inventorship and authorship in academic science and derives some policy implications on the institutional mechanisms allocating scientific credit. It reports and assesses the recent empirical evidence on the importance of social norms for the attribution of inventorship and authorship in teams of scientists. Finally, it discusses those norms from a social welfare perspective. The social norms that regulate the distribution of authorship and inventorship do not reflect exclusively the relative contribution of each team member but also the members' relative seniority or status. In the case of inventorship, such social norms appear to be as important as the legal norms whose respect is often invoked by technology transfer officers. Authorship and inventorship appear to be obsolete because they do not capture the increasing division of labor and responsibility typical of contemporary scientific research teams. The informative value of both authorship and inventorship attributions may be much more limited than assumed by recent evaluation exercises.

Despite the analytical and policy importance of this distinction, the empirical literature has not yet been able to clearly separate these two types of knowledge spillovers. Two quite distinct traditions of econometric analysis have been trying to explore the existence of knowledge ...

Abstract: This paper is a first attempt towards the full inclusion of a group of variables greatly studied in the current literature on innovation and industrial economics - such as knowledge links and the structure of competition and collaboration in a sector - into the determinants ...

The ownership structure of inventions stemming from academic research is relevant for technology transfer and a highly disputed issue. This is especially true in Europe, where different countries have different legal rules and are undertaking important reforms both of universities and ...

Authorship and inventorship are attribution rights that contribute to the reputation of individual scientists, but have to be distributed across several individuals, due to the importance of teamwork in both science and technology. For academic teams that both publish and patent their research results, we can compare the social and legal norms that regulate the joint distribution of these two types of attribution rights. We use text-mining techniques to identify 681 “patent-publication pairs”(related sets of patents and ...

Abstract The interaction between the sectoral composition of the economy, the scientific and technological research activity of firms and universities, and the activity of large firms is considered as a crucial factor of growth in the advanced countries. This paper enquires about the relationship between the dynamics of international technological specialization, on the one hand, and market expansion and profit opportunities, accumulation of technical and scientific knowledge and market structures, on the other hand.

Franco Malerba (**) Fabio Montobbio (**) vativa delle imprese e le tecnologie necessarie a sviluppare prodotti e processi; b) gli attori chiave nel settore, oltre alle imprese innovative: utilizzatori e consumatori (e quindi la domanda), fornitori, operatore pubblico, centri di ricerca, università, organizzazioni finanziarie, ecc., ed i network di collaborazione formale od informale con cui gli attori sono legati l'uno all'altro. In molti casi sono proprio i network l'unità competitiva fondamentale.

Abstract The paper examines the most recent empirical studies on the impact of university patenting on the economics of public research. Most contributions discuss the controversial effects of the Bayh-Dole Act in the US, or attempt to measure the scope of university patenting in Europe. We highlight two main research lines. The first one deals with the possibility that patenting research tools may slow down scientific progress, whose cumulative nature requires free access to the stock of existing knowledge.

Résumé L'article propose une description quantitative du changement structurel dans les activités innovantes relevant de quatre secteurs leaders–chimie, pharmacie, électronique et machines-outils–en Europe, aux États-Unis et au Japon, et suggère un cadre interprétatif pour expliquer le différentiel de taux d'innovation dans et entre les secteurs.

This paper studies the nature, sources and determinants of international patenting activity in Latin American countries (LACs) and examines the extent to which LACs benefit from R&D that is performed in the G-5 countries (France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States). By using patents and patent citations from the United States Patent and Trademark Office, we trace sectoral knowledge flows from G-5 countries to LACs.

ABSTRACT This paper tests the impact of the reinforcement of IPRs, and in particular of the TRIPS agreement, on technological collaborations between emerging and advanced countries using international patent databases (EPO and USPTO). Technological collaborations generate knowledge flows between inventors through interpersonal and face to face contacts.

Franco Malerba (**) Fabio Montobbio (**) nute nei documenti di richiesta di brevetto di imprese e istituti di ricerca italiani1. L'immagine complessiva che deriva dallo studio si può sintetizzare nelle seguenti affermazioni. L'Italia detiene una quota molto limitata di domande di brevetti (Epo) nel settore chimico-farmaceutico e nell'elettronica. Una parziale eccezione è rappresentata dal settore della meccanica.

The issue of intellectual property and knowledge transfer from universities and public research organizations (PROs) stirs heated debate and is the object of strong policy interest in developed and developing countries alike. The question that many authors and policy makers try to tackle is how knowledge produced in universities and PROs can be transferred and used in industry, in order to contribute to economic growth, development and improvement in standards of living.

Abstract: This paper compares the value and impact of academic patents in five different European countries with different institutional frameworks: Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Ownership patterns of academic patents are found to:(i) differ greatly across country, due to a combination of legal norms on IP and institutional features of the university system;(ii) be strongly associated to academic patents' value, as measured by patent citations.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the growth of technological capabilities at the micro level in different national innovation systems in six large emerging economies (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Russia, and South Africa). We build a novel database that identifies precisely the different typologies of innovative actors in these countries, their technological specialization and their degree of integration in the global knowledge network.

This paper estimates the international diffusion and obsolescence of technological knowledge by technological field and country using patent citations from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and from the European Patent Office (EPO). We control for self-citations and for procedural and legal differences between patent offices in the citation procedures using equivalent patents. We find that: (1) there are clear biases in patent examination processes that generate citations in the two offices; (2) at the EPO we find a strong localization effect at country level, and the size is comparable to that found at the USPTO; (3) technological fields have different properties of diffusion and decay of technical knowledge in the two patent offices that do not depend upon a patent office bias; (4) using EPO data, the USA is not the leading country in terms of citations made and received as occurs at the USPTO.

Cet article présente une étude empirique sur la relation entre les activités de dépôts de brevets et celles de publication des chercheurs académiques. Cette étude se base sur un échantillon de dépôt de brevets écrits par des professeurs d'université italiens. En traitant les brevets comme des événements discrets caractérisant l'évolution du travail de publication continu des professeurs, nous concluons qu'il n'existe pas d'arbitrage: les inventeurs académiques ne publient pas moins que leurs collègues qui ne brevètent pas. ...