What are the factors behind the recent development of industrial technology in China? Does China follow the path of learning technology from outside through direct foreign investment and international trade as other Asian newly industrialized economies, or imitate the U.S. model that develop science and technology within the country based on the strong domestic research capacity? This study examines these questions using a comprehensive research model and a new Chinese patent dataset. The patent statistics in this study are created based on more than 120 thousand granted invention patent abstracts in China between 1985 and 2003. Compared with the Chinese patent data used in prior studies, this dataset distinguishes firm patents from patents awarded to universities and research institutes. The dependent variable for regression analysis is the technological innovation performance of Chinese domestic firms as measured by the number of patents awarded to firms in 30 Chinese provinces from 1989 to 1999. The final panel data for regression analysis were completed with other provincial indicators for the same years on research and development (R and D) expenditures by firms and public institutions, foreign direct investment (FDI), domestic consumption, and foreign exports. The results of count data fixed effect regression approaches show that the efforts of firms, measured by industrial R and D expenditures, spillovers from R and D activities conducted at universities and public institutions in the same region, and demand driven mainly by foreign exports are the most prominent positive factors in the domestic firms technological innovation performance. While the net impact of FDI on domestic firms patenting activity is mostly insignificant and sometimes negative

The goal of this project is to compare and contrast four different techniques used to valuate a company's Intellectual Property (IP); specifically a patent portfolio.

The government has indicated that innovation fosters economic growth and is essential to maintaining a competitive position in international markets. Patents are the preferred mechanism by which the Australian Government and other governments encourage their nationals to protect their innovations. The question of the entitlement was raised in several cases in the Federal Court of Australia where there has been a failure to name all of the inventors on a patent grant (non-joinder) or where persons were mis-named as inventors, who were not and consequently have no interest in a grant (rnis-joinder). In both cases, parties who were not themselves daiming an entitlement to the invention, brought objections based on a number of grounds, including entitlement. The results have been the revocation of the patent in the case on the non-joinder of an inventor and in the case of mis-joinder, the preliminary view of a judge of the Federal Court has been, that the patent would be invalid through lack of entitlement. The result is that competitors are permitted to 'exploit' the invention, as the subject matter is not protected by a patent. The implications are far reaching, For example, where a research team in collaboration with another develops an invention but omits the inventive contribution of even one member of one team or includes a person who has not made an inventive contribution in the patent grant, the patent will be invalid. In these circumstances, the author considers that the result produces a disincentive to innovate. Consideration of this area in other jurisdictions reveals that the U.S. and the U.K. have recognised this as an unsatisfactory state of affairs. As a result, Congress in the U.S. made provision in their Patent Code in the early 1950's, that in the case of error or mistake giving rise to a non-joinder or mis-joinder of inventors, the patent would not be invalid but could be rectified by the Director of Patents and Trade Marks (the 'Director'). In the U.K., the Comptroller has powers to deal with a wide variety of cases involving entitlement to ownership of a patent. The situations include but are not limited to cases where some but not all of the persons entitled to the grant have been granted the patent, i.e. non-joinder, or where a person entitled to be granted a patent, has been granted a patent together with a person who is not entitled, i.e. mis-joinder. The thesis will focus on the non-joinder and mis-joinder of inventors, but the U.K. provision addresses a wider field of parties entitled, whether entitled as inventors or on some other basis. In addition, the U.K. and Germany have made provision restricting the persons who are able to challenge a patent on entitlement grounds. This is restricted to those persons having an interest in the patent, rather than open to any person, as is the case in Australia. The Australian decisions have been determined on historic cases dating back to the 17th century. It is timely to consider amendments which will overcome revocation of patents under Australian law, for what is essentially a matter between the persons interested. These amendments will accordingly encourage innovation, particularly in an environment where intellectual property has taken on greater importance and where the identification of the inventor has become more complex as collaborations in research become more common.

Intelligence tools have been developed and applied widely in many different areas in engineering, business and management. Many commercialized tools for business intelligence are available in the market. However, no practically useful tools for technology intelligence are available at this time, and very little academic research in technology intelligence methods has been conducted to date. Patent databases are the most important data source for technology intelligence tools, but patents inherently contain unstructured data. Consequently, extracting text data from patent databases, converting that data to meaningful information and generating useful knowledge from this information become complex tasks. These tasks are currently being performed very ineffectively, inefficiently and unreliably by human experts. This deficiency is particularly vexing in product planning, where awareness of market needs and technological capabilities is critical for identifying opportunities for new products and services. Total nescience of the text of patents, as well as inadequate, unreliable and untimely knowledge derived from these patents, may consequently result in missed opportunities that could lead to severe competitive disadvantage and potentially catastrophic loss of revenue. The research performed in this dissertation tries to correct the abovementioned deficiency with an approach called patent mining. The research is conducted at Finex, an iron casting company that produces traditional kitchen skillets. To 'mine' pertinent patents, experts in new product development at Finex modeled one ontology for the required product features and another for the attributes of requisite metallurgical enabling technologies from which new product opportunities for skillets are identified by applying natural language processing, information retrieval, and machine learning (classification) to the text of patents in the USPTO database. Three main scenarios are examined in my research. Regular classification (RC) relies on keywords that are extracted directly from a group of USPTO patents. Ontological classification (OC) relies on keywords that result from an ontology developed by Finex experts, which is evaluated and improved by a panel of external experts. Ontological semantic classification (OSC) uses these ontological keywords and their synonyms, which are extracted from the WordNet database. For each scenario, I evaluate the performance of three classifiers: k-Nearest Neighbor (k-NN), random forest, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). My research shows that OSC is the best scenario and SVM is the best classifier for identifying product planning opportunities, because this combination yields the highest score in metrics that are generally used to measure classification performance in machine learning (e.g., ROC-AUC and F-score). My method also significantly outperforms current practice, because I demonstrate in an experiment that neither the experts at Finex nor the panel of external experts are able to search for and judge relevant patents with any degree of effectiveness, efficiency or reliability. This dissertation provides the rudiments of a theoretical foundation for patent mining, which has yielded a machine learning method that is deployed successfully in a new product planning setting (Finex). Further development of this method could make a significant contribution to management practice by identifying opportunities for new product development that have been missed by the approaches that have been deployed to date.

Abstract not available

The research performed throughout this dissertation aims at implementing quantitative methods in order to assess economic and technological performances of firms, i.e. it tries to assess the impacts of the determinants of technological activity on the results of this activity. For this purpose, a representative sample of the most important R&D firms in the world is constituted. The micro-economic nature of the analysis, as well as its international dimension are two main features of this research at the empirical level. The second chapter illustrates the importance of R&D investments, patenting activities and other measures of technological activities performed by firms over the last 10 years. The third chapter describes the main features as well as the construction of the database. The raw data sample consists of comparable detailed micro-level data on 2676 large manufacturing firms from several countries. These firms have reported important R&D expenditures over the period 1980-1994. The fourth chapter explores the dynamic structure of the patent-R&D relationship by considering the number of patent applications as a function of present and lagged levels of R&D expenditures. R&D spillovers as well as technological and geographical opportunities are taken into account as additional determinants in order to explain patenting behaviours. The estimates are based on recently developed econometric techniques that deal with the discrete non-negative nature of the dependent patent variable as well as the simultaneity that can arise between the R&D decisions and patenting. The results show evidence of a rather contemporaneous impact of R&D activities on patenting. As far as R&D spillovers are concerned, these externalities have a significantly higher impact on patenting than own R&D. Furthermore, these effects appear to take more time, three years on average, to show up in patents. The fifth chapter explores the contribution of own stock of R&D capital to productivity performance of firms. To this end the usual productivity residual methodology is implemented. The empirical section presents a first set of results which replicate the analysis of previous studies and tries to assess the robustness of the findings with regard to the above issues. Then, further results, based on different sub samples of the data set, investigate to what extent the R&D contribution on productivity differs across firms of different industries and geographic areas or between small and large firms and low and high-tech firms. The last section explores more carefully the simultaneity issue. On the whole, the estimates indicate that R&D has a positive impact on productivity performances. Yet, this contribution is far from being homogeneous across the different dimensions of data or according to the various assumptions retained in the productivity model. The last empirical chapter goes deeper into the analysis of firms' productivity increases, by considering besides own R&D activities the impact of technological spillovers. The chapter begins by surveying the alternative ways proposed in the literature in order to asses the effect of R&D spillovers on productivity. The main findings reported by some studies at the micro level are then outlined. Then, the framework to formalize technological externalities and other technological determinants is exposed. This framework is based on a positioning of firms into a technological space using their patent distribution across technological fields. The question of whether the externalities generated by the technological and geographic neighbours are different on the recipient's productivity is also addressed by splitting the spillover variable into a local and national component. Then, alternative measures of technological proximity are examined. Some interesting observations emerge from the empirical results. First, the impact of spillovers on productivity increases is positive and much more important than the contribution of own R&D. Second, spillover effects are not the same according to whether they emanate from firms specialized in similar technological fields or firms more distant in the technological space. Finally, the magnitude and direction of these effects are radically different within and between the pillars of the Triad. While European firms do not appear to particularly benefit from both national and international sources of spillovers, US firms are mainly receptive to their national stock and Japanese firms take advantage from the international stock.

No description available.

Anställda arbetstagare och arbetsgivare har sedan 1949 genom lag (1949:345) om rätt till arbetstagares uppfinningar haft rättigheter och skyldigheter avseende arbetstagares uppfinningar, men lagen har inte nyanserats i takt med att uppfinningar allt oftare tillkommer utanför traditionella anställningsförhållanden. Andra rättsområden som inte har till ursprungligt syfte att reglera uppfinnares ersättning tillämpas idag i tvister som rör utanförstående arbetstagare, eftersom patenträtten och uppfinnarrätten inte innefattar några regleringar som rör utanförstående arbetstagares uppfinningar. I uppsatsen utreds huruvida ytterligare reglering är motiverad. Uppsatsen inleds med att ge en inblick i tillvägagångssättet för hur ett patent söks som följs av en utredning av arbetstagarbegreppet för att sedan övergå till en utredning kring rättsläget. Vidare utreds vad ett förvärv egentligen avser och hur ersättningsnivåerna bestäms enligt lag och avtal. För att ge en större inblick i rättsläget ges exempel på domslut och skiljedomar. För det praktiska syfte som uppsatsen ska uppfylla, har olika tillvägagångssätt för att väcka talan i domstol angivits. Uppsatsen avslutas med en analys kring rättsläget, om lagen uppfyller propositionens syfte, om lagstiftningen är tillräcklig och om den behöver ändras. Analysen berör även ersättningen till uppfinnare, hur begreppet arbetstagare kan vara ett problem och varför sekretessen på skiljedomarna är ett problem för normbildningen och därav ett hinder för förutsägbarheten. Analysen utgår från uppställningen i problemformuleringen.

C'est sous l'impulsion des travaux fondateurs de Schumpeter que l'innovation se positionne au coeur de l'analyse économique. Depuis ces travaux fondateurs, trop peu d'innovation studies se sont toutefois consacrées aux usages du brevet dans la longue durée. Partant de là, cette thèse a pour ambition première de fournir, outre des renseignements empiriques de bonne qualité et de nouvelles séries statistiques, une lecture renouvelée, d'inspiration cliométrique, des brevets dans leurs dimensions structurelles et spatiales. Notre premier apport est de présenter l'organisation d'une nouvelle base de données sur l'évolution de longue période des brevets dans 40 pays du XVIIe siècle à 1945 et dans plus de 150 pays de 1945 à nos jours. Nous montrons, par la suite, que des événements certes rares, mais particulièrement significatifs, ont conditionné les pulsations de l'histoire économique des brevets. Les guerres, la promulgation de lois, l'ouverture ou la fermeture d'offices, mais aussi des effets purement statistiques ont, sur le très long terme, normé, à travers le dépôt et la délivrance des séries étudiées, l'existence des systèmes de brevets. En prolongement, nous déterminons, à travers une analyse spectrale et co-spectrale, la périodicité de nos séries de brevets. Enfin, nous livrons un éclairage plus contemporain, en termes de convergence, sur les dynamiques structurelles et surtout spatiales en oeuvre dans les systèmes de brevets des pays européens. / At the behest of Schumpeter's seminal works, innovation is now positioned at the heart of economic analysis. However, since these pioneering works, not enough innovation studies have been devoted to the uses of patent over time. Starting from this assertion, the present thesis aims first and foremost at providing - in addition to good quality empirical information and new statistical series - a new interpretation of patents in their structural and spatial dimensions, based on a cliometric approach. Our first contribution is to present the organisation of a new database on the evolution over a long period of time of patents in 40 countries from the XVIIth century up to 1945 and in over 150 countries from 1945 to the present time. We show in a second step that rare but nevertheless significant events conditioned the heartbeat of the economic history of patents. Wars, the promulgation of laws, the opening or closing of offices, but also purely statistical effects standardized over the long term the existence of patent systems through the application and granting of the series under study. Furthermore we determine the periodicity of our patent series using a spectral and co-spectral analysis. Finally we propose a more contemporary insight - in terms of convergence - into structural and more specifically spatial dynamics at work in the European countries patent systems.

QC 351 A7 no. 69 / The history of modern wide -field, high-speed catadioptric lenses is reviewed. One system comprising only spherical curves and representative of the current art for low-light-level systems is evaluated and used as a baseline design in a weight-reduction study. Five aspheric designs are computed and evaluated. It is found that the use of aspherics will permit weight reduction only in certain instances, i.e., if one element of an all-spherical design can be eliminated or if a fundamentally different configuration that is possible only with aspherics is substituted for the all-spherical configuration. Of these possibilities, the elimination of an element is the best replacement for the baseline design. The case of a highly constrained, purely refractive triplet is studied in some detail. Four designs are computed -from the all-spherical case to the most complex polynomial aspheric. It is found that, if only conic aspherics are employed, significant improvement can be obtained and the problems involved are sensibly the same as those in all-spherical designs. When complex aspherics are applied, the problem becomes surprisingly difficult, and there is some indication that a computer can deal with it better than can a human lens designer.